Looking at E. Leighman Gafford's brilliantly colored abstract pieces, you would never suspect his subjects might come from the medicine cabinet.

Vitamins, sulfur, citric acid, cold remedies and even cleaning compounds explode into kaleidoscopic images resembling stained glass, peacock feathers, exotic plants or a nighttime aerial view of a neon city.

"My art is anything you find around the house," said Gafford, of Ventura.

The retired lunar scientist and geologist uses his high-powered Zeiss microscope to examine the compounds through a polarizing lens, then scans the slide for the part of the image that strikes him artistically before photographing it with a 35 mm camera mounted atop the microscope.

"On one slide there are thousands of potential images," he said. Vitamin C typically produces circular images but might resemble a Tyrannosaurus rex, he said. Sugar looks like a green tropical plant.

Messing with the psyche

"It's like automobiles," Gafford said. "They have some common characteristics but many variables.

"Sometimes I will mix them, sometimes I'll put them in the freezer. That is how some of them have different looks I have messed with its psyche."

Gafford, who holds a doctorate from the University of Oklahoma, was a recognized scientific member of the Society of Sigma Xi and was included in "Who's Who of Scientists" from 1974 to 1980. He worked for Battelle Research Laboratories in Richmond, Wash., as a research scientist and studied lunar rocks for NASA.

"It started with a NASA lunar rock," he said. "I made a slice of it, polished it and made wafer-thin slices. When you make it really thin and look at it through polarized light you can identify the different minerals, how they are formed and something about the history of the rock," he said.

"As a scientist, I have been using this technique to identify things," Gafford said. "But there is an artistic part of this. These images are gorgeous."

Although he would occasionally notice beautiful patterns, that wasn't what he was paid to do, he said. "You see a lot of things as a scientist, but you don't really see them. I was not versatile enough to look at it from an aesthetic standpoint, but now I have a hard time seeing it from a scientific standpoint."

No more tunnel vision

"It took me a long time to quit being a scientist and become an artist," Gafford said. "It wasn't an easy transition at all.

"I had the tunnel vision of a scientist, but I broke loose from that."

When he retired, one of his professors and mentors thought they might continue to do scientific projects together. "But when I got the Zeiss microscope I realized I didn't want to do the kind of projects I had always done," he said. "I looked at magnesium sulfate from a totally different standpoint, and it fell into place."

Gafford transfers his images to canvas, some as large as 3-by-5 feet. He takes the film, digitizes and then prints it.

Not knowing what to do with his images or how his work compared professionally, he joined the Ventura Camera Club and started entering and winning competitions.

He won a first-place ribbon at the Ventura County Fair in abstract photography in the professional division in 1999.

"At that point, I realized I had the talent to make good art," Gafford said. He joined art organizations, continued winning awards and had solo shows. He was the featured artist at the Ventura Artwalk in the fall of 2002, participated in the 2006 Ventura Studio Artists Tour and will take part in the 2007 tour May 18-20. His work is in galleries in San Francisco; Boca Raton, Fla.; New York; and Madrid, Spain. He and his wife, Carol Jean Brown, collaborated on a book, "Nature's Crystal Flowers" in 2001.

Gafford delights in educating people about his work. He and his wife give presentations at local schools several times a week through the Children's Celebration of the Arts program sponsored by the city of Ventura and the Ventura Unified School District. He built 50 small fixed microscopes from PVC pipe and old camera lenses for the children to look through and observe the chemicals.

As an example, he melts some moth crystals between two glass slides and puts it under the microscope. The crystalline shapes move as if they are alive, spreading and building on each other, forming designs.

"To see their faces light up is wonderful that is as good as first place in any art show," he said. "It's immediate, and it's real."

Gafford's work can be seen on his Web site: http://www.amasterofmagic.com/art.

To recommend an artist to be profiled in this section, contact Nicole D'Amore at ArtProfiles@Roadrunner.com or 405-0364.