I'm Not a Scientist, and That's Okay

On the Origins of My Art

The first question I get asked at every art show is, “Are you a scientist?”

I understand why people ask this, but I don’t love this question, because I have to start so many interactions with a no. I deny people the tidy narrative that they were expecting. I get it. It makes complete sense that I would be a scientist who fell in love with the view through my microscope and decided to paint what I saw.

But I’m not a scientist.

I didn’t study science in college.

I’m not a doctor, nurse, or teacher.

And I don’t have any personal medical history related to my work.

My usual response is “I’m just an artist inspired by science!”

That is the truth, but not the whole truth.

The truth is, I started painting scientific images by accident. When I began painting watercolors, I was entranced by the wet-in-wet technique, where you paint a piece of background and then add another color while the first is still wet. I made many simple, lovely paintings by dropping dots of wet watercolor into squares of wet watercolor. When I showed these early paintings, people told me they looked like organisms under a microscope, or like dividing cells.

Watercolor evolution (L-R): Detail from Blue Variations, 2006; Blue Mitosis, 2011; Blue Microbes, 2023

I was fascinated by this idea. I started looking at microscope images of bacteria, viruses and cells. To put it grandly, my origin story as an artist is intimately tied to the microbial origins of life on earth. I was mesmerized not only by their beauty, but by the astonishing fact that a whole unseen ecosystem was living in my body and all around me, in the water, soil, and air.

Sit very still. Your cells are dividing right now.

White blood cells are battling the bacteria in a scratch on your arm.

Microbes in your gut are breaking down your breakfast.

Neurons are carrying these words from your eyes to your brain.

So many processes are happening inside you and all around you that you rarely notice unless they go wrong.

I am far from the only artist to be inspired by these microscopic wonders. I’ve seen cells and microbes star in every visual medium from glass to photography to fiber to live bacteria in petri dishes. In 2011, Björk released Biophilia, a concept album about the natural world, which included songs about everything from biology to geology to astronomy. For the video of the song “Hollow” Björk collaborated with biomedical animator Drew Berry to create images of DNA replication and transcription, diving deeper and deeper through powers of magnification until we see individual chromosomes.

Clockwise from left: Push, cell-inspired quilt by Betty Busby; I Caught it at the Movies, Mixed Media installation by Elaine Whittaker; Still from Hollow, by Björk and Drew Berry; Virus Doily by Laura Splan

“There is grandeur in this view of life,“  Darwin said, that “from so simple a beginning endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being, evolved.”  

As a non-scientist, I do not have the joy of discovering or studying microorganisms, but as an artist, I try to do them honor.

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