New prints

Some new prints are hanging in the studio.

I have a show coming up at a biotech company called Cell Signaling.
I thought it would be an interesting challenge to try to come up with a monotype series about cell signaling --with a small c, small s-- for this show, whose primary audience will be scientists.

So, what is cell signaling? My untutored understanding is that cells communicate with other cells by releasing signaling chemicals. Sometimes they do this while touching each other, other times they are floating in an intracellular fluid (I imagine this like a sort of swimming pool for cells.)

If you'd like to see some scientific charts of this from Cell Signaling the company--with a large C, large S--take a look at this link: http://www.cellsignal.com/reference/pathway/index.html

So how to translate this to a work of art? What I noticed about the scientific charts is all the colored ellipses and circles that represent the chemicals and cells. Besides encoding chemical information, these charts can be seen as a set of color relationships, or shapes in spatial relationships. That is something an artist can work with, but perhaps not enough for me. I am a realist. So I decided to think artistically about another aspect of cell signaling. Cell Signaling says that their mission is, "... to provide the means to understand the signaling aberrations that underlie diseases, including cancer, diabetes and neurodegenerative diseases."

Aberrations that underlie diseases. I just finished reading a very good book, The Bird: A Natural History of Who Birds Are, Where They Came From, and How They Live by Colin Tudge. While Tudge doesn't exactly address diseases, he does write about all sorts of aberrations, ranging from the mutations that changed dinosaurs into birds to the mass extinction of the dodo and the passenger pigeon by human hands. This connection figures into my artistic thinking. I am making extinct birds covered with patterns of colored  circles--an artistic response to the idea of cell signaling. It does not make sense in any scientific way, but art makes connections in other ways.