http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/1192358.stm
Beautiful science inspires artists
A breast cancer cell dies [David Becker/Wellcome Trust]
By BBC News Online's Ivan Noble
Not so, says Denna Jones, curator of a new exhibition which puts beautiful scientific images alongside science-inspired art.
Growth and Form can be seen at the Wellcome Trust's Two10 Gallery in London and on the internet.
"They are intended to be simultaneously seductive and repellent, an evocation of beauty and disgust," reads the catalogue.
Science and art are two separate worlds and never the twain shall meet.
Scientists are no more likely to pick up a paintbrush than artists are to don a white coat or peer into a microscope.
You find scientists who stain their work and, when they do, they'll use a nice shade of orange.
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Denna Jones
Exhibition curator |
"Scientists will usually deny they are influenced by art. But you do find scientists who stain their work and you'll see that, when they do, they'll decide to use a nice shade of orange," she told BBC News Online.
Scientific inspiration
And the inspiration for the exhibition came from a book which was a bible for artists in the mid-20th Century but was written by a scientist in 1917, she said.
Germlights by Sue Withers [DA Jones, Cedar Street]
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It features a series of often artistically stunning stills and moving images emerging from recent biomedical research, together with works of art with unmistakable scientific influences.
Pictures of cancer cells at the moment of reproduction compete for the attention with works like "Breathe" by Rachel Chapman: a series of three giant Petri dishes containing living fungal organisms.
'Seductive and repellent'
Mark Wright's paintings - Flux, Fusion and Filter - are inspired by microscopic structures, while Sue Withers' Germlights are a series of gently illuminated, microbiologically based paintings which have to be touched to be switched on.
A cluster of sensory nerve cells [Kate Nobes and Mark Shipman/The Wellcome Trust]
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Biomedical Image Awards 2001 special excellence award winners Emma Louise Dormand and Andrea Brand display their confocal image of the developing nervous system of a fruit fly embryo.
It is a fascinating microscopic structure which is helping scientists explore the way the human nervous system develops.
Beneath the surface
"We look on the surface in daily life and we don't often get the chance to look beneath. I was interested in scientists and artists who do that," Ms Jones explained.
Her inspiration was the book On Growth and Form, written by the British research scientist D'arcy Thompson in 1917.
Thompson said that all art and learning were one and that all biological phenomena could be reduced to mathematics.
In 1951, his book prompted the Institute of Contemporary Arts to stage an exhibition of then modern biomedical images and art works.
Today's exhibition continues the theme and there has been no shortage of interest.
"We're a small gallery but there's been a tremendous response so far - the catalogue has been flying off the shelves," Ms Jones said. "There's such a range of visual content - staggering colours and light - that it appeals to everyone from a child of two to a research scientist.
The Enduring Relationship of Science and Art
ReplyDeleteAdapted from a lecture by Robert Eskridge titled “Exploration and the Cosmos: The Consilience of Science and Art.”
Art Institute of Chicago
Science and art naturally overlap. Both are a means of investigation. Both involve ideas, theories, and hypotheses that are tested in places where mind and hand come together—the laboratory and studio. Artists, like scientists, study—materials, people, culture, history, religion, mythology— and learn to transform information into something else. In ancient Greece, the word for art was techne, from which technique and technology are derived—terms that are aptly applied to both scientific and artistic practices.
Art and Scientific Investigation in Early-European Art
ReplyDeleteLeonardo da Vinci, painter and draftsman of the High Renaissance, is best known as an artist whose works were informed by scientific investigation. Leonardo observed the world closely, studying physiology and anatomy in order to create convincing images of the human form. He believed that the moral and ethical meanings of his narrative paintings would emerge only through the accurate representation of human gesture and expression. For this Christian artist, science and art were different paths that led to the same destination—a higher spiritual truth. His Sketch of Uterus with Foetus (c. 1511–13) is one of several thousand drawings he produced in his lifetime in which artistic and scientific investigation are bound together. These extraordinary drawings are revered as examples of the Renaissance concept of the integration of all disciplines.
The Astronomer (1668) by Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer is another example of the profound connection between science and art. The people of 17th-century Netherlands had an exploratory spirit. Equally interested in this world and the larger universe, the familiar and the exotic, they were intent on looking and investigating. It was here in the early 17th century that the microscope and telescope were first developed. Vermeer’s painting celebrates an astronomer. Yet it equally celebrates the work of artists and the materials of this world. The painting hanging on the back wall was created by a local artist; the Middle Eastern carpet on the table was crafted by a foreign artist; Vermeer’s own paints (ground mineral pigments mixed with linseed oil) and brushes were produced by local artisans. The globe at which the astronomer gazes evidences the link between science and art most pointedly, for it demonstrates this astronomer’s—and his culture’s—combined interest in finely crafted objects and scientific systems, such as cartography and astronomy.
The Science of Color in 19th-Century Painting
ReplyDeleteIn the late-19th and early-20th centuries, the physiological, psychological, and phenomenal effects of color and light were of primary concern to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist artists such as Edgar Degas (1834–1917), Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Paul Gauguin (1843–1903), and Claude Monet (1840–1926). Considered by many to be the greatest nature painter in modern-art history, Monet suggested that our sense of our physical environment changes continuously with our shifting perceptions of light and color. In On the Bank of the Seine, Bennecourt (1868), a painting of his wife-to-be, Monet captures a fleeting “impression” of the landscape through loose brushwork and composition. His impression is pre-cognitive—before the mind labels, identifies, and converts what it sees into memory. Tellingly, the woman in the painting looks not at the house and trees across the river, but down at their wavering, upside-down reflections in the river, a perspective that echoes the process of perception itself. Images in the form of light enter the eye, an orb with a nerve-sensitive background. As light penetrates, it is inverted and projected onto the back of that light-sensitive orb, where the brain processes the information. Monet’s painting captures the vibration between impression and perception—the contingent moment. It conveys a sense of trembling as the light and color of the landscape shift and time passes.
A number of years after Monet’s Bennecourt, Georges Seurat began painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte—1884 (1884–1886) (above). As an art student at the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, he studied the physics of color, and this enormous painting is an exercise in color theory. Unlike Renaissance and Dutch artists, Seurat and Monet did not mix their own paint. They benefited from breakthroughs by French chemists in the early 19th century who had invented both premixed paints packaged in tubes and synthetic pigments, such as ultramarine blue, which previously had been made from ground lapis lazuli and was, therefore, the most expensive pigment. Neither Seurat nor Monet, with little money in their pockets, could have created their blue-filled, experimental works without the scientific breakthroughs earlier that century.
Using these new paints, Seurat invented a technique called Pointillism to investigate how adjacent colors blend when taken in by the eye. Up close, the surface of his painting contains thousands of painted dots and dashes, discrete areas of color. But Seurat placed these dots of complementary colors next to each other—purple and yellow, orange and blue, green and red—so that at a distance they interact to create vibrant blended colors and larger, whole forms. Carrying his scientific approach to color theory to the edges of the image, Seurat represented the range of the visible spectrum in the painting’s border dominated by red and blue.
20th-Century Art and Science
ReplyDeletePablo Picasso's (1881–1973) portrait of art dealer Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler (1910) combines Monet’s ideas about the contingency of time and Seurat’s theory about the perception of discrete elements. Here, Picasso breaks up the figure and objects in his composition in the style known as Cubism. Instead of rendering his subjects as distinctly recognizable forms, he paints them from several points of view. Kahnweiler’s head, suit, watch fob, and hands, as well as the still life to the left and the decorated wall behind, remain identifiable, but these elements have been broken up into flattened planes and rearranged across the picture surface. Painted just a few years after Albert Einstein put forth his theory of relativity, which asserts the contingent nature of observing reality, Picasso’s work similarly illustrates the elusive presence of his subject—Mr. Kahnweiler. Picasso’s Cubist painting style, like studying Einstein’s scientific theory, requires careful analysis, but it rewards the viewer’s effort with perception and understanding.
The invention of photography in the middle of the 19th century was a technological wonder—artistically and scientifically. The practice of oxidizing and fixing images on light-sensitive paper or a metal plate posed a great challenge to painters, who had historically been charged with the task of providing their culture with images of itself and the world around them. People believed this new medium could represent the world accurately and more quickly. Ansel Adams (1902–1984) one of the most extraordinary photographers of the North American landscape, used his camera to capture the spirit and beauty of the American West. His majestic vistas of mountains and rivers, such as The Tetons and the Snake River, Grand Teton National Park, Wyoming (1942), embraced the bond between man and nature while recording with astonishing technical accuracy the phenomenal effects of light and atmosphere.
Today, light-and-space artist James Turrell seeks to link the terrestrial and celestial realms in his work at Roden Crater, a natural cinder volcano situated on the southwestern edge of the Painted Desert in northern Arizona. Since 1972, Turrell has been transforming the crater into a large-scale artwork by subtly manipulating and reshaping its form. Like Renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci did, Turrell uses his knowledge of engineering, and, like Seurat and Monet, he employs his knowledge of the effects of light and space. When Turrell completes his gigantic project, visitors standing in the middle of the crater on the reflective material with which the artist has lined it will feel suspended between the sky and earth.
There has long been a connection between art and science, one that can be traced back to the Egyptian pyramids. History proves that the two disciplines cannot exist without each other, enduring in constantly changing and evolving relationships.