Mitosis, Mon Amour

Cells keep on dividing and I keep on painting them

Blue Mitosis III, Watercolor, 2025

Mitosis, or cell division, is a fundamental process of life. It’s also a foundational part of my art practice.

Most animal and plant cells reproduce by mitosis. Daniel Gilchrist of the National Human Genome Research center uses this simple analogy: “We can think about mitosis like making a copy of an instruction manual. Copy each page, then give one copy to each of two people. In mitosis, a cell copies each chromosome, then gives one copy to each of two daughter cells.” It’s a remarkable trick, and your cells are doing it right now.

When people ask me how I got started making science-inspired art, I tell them how I started experimenting with wet-in-wet watercolor, making little squares of color with splashes of wet paint within. I wasn’t trying to depict anything in particular, I just liked the patterns that the paint made. But when I showed these early paintings, I got interesting responses. People kept telling me they looked like things under a microscope. Specifically, they told me that my paintings looked like dividing cells.

Some of my early mitosis watercolors

Intrigued, I looked up images of cells in mitosis, and sure enough, they bore a strong resemblance to my paintings. So I read some more and started making mitosis watercolors on purpose. My early pieces were very simple and kind of messy, using the wet-in-wet technique to create the sort of fuzzy images you might see under an older microscope.

Then I had a little artistic breakthrough. By using a two-step process, first dry and then wet, I found I could create translucent “cytoplasm” that gave the effect of being able to see through a cell to the action inside. Once I got the hang of the technique, I painted this piece, Blue Mitosis, in 2011. It became my logo, my first silk scarf design and the cover of the EMBO (European Molecular Biology Organization) Journal.

Blue Mitosis, Watercolor, 2011, and what it became

Given that mitosis is essential to life itself, I assumed I would find lots of other artists engaged with the topic. But when I went looking, I discovered surprisingly little fine art inspired by cell division. Some exceptions: Rogan Brown made this spectacular cut paper piece, Cytokinesis Variations, and David Goodsell this fantastically detailed watercolor of a cell genetically engineered to divide slowly.

Mitosis-inspired artwork by Rogan Brown (left) and David Goodsell

And then there’s me. As with most things I paint, I simplify my cell images to distill their essence. I use a grid format because my brain likes that. I often make “textbook style” mitosis watercolors with all the phases in order. Like my mitochondria paintings, these are the images that almost everyone at an art festival can identify. But my favorite thing is to mix the techniques and images, old and new, wet and dry, messy and precise, to give an artistic impression of this cellular process that is at once simple and profound.

Mitosis in Lavender and Blue, Watercolor, 2025

You can find this piece and other mitosis watercolors in my online shop, and I hope you do, because I don’t have any festivals coming up until the fall : )

I’ll be back in a few weeks with some physics and chemistry for a change. If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with a friend, buying me a coffee, or purchasing a painting.