introduction: art
In the laundry room of our family home in CA, there is a painting of a neon green, we’ll call it… “abstract”… spotted dog, sliding across a fire red floor. I painted it when I was seven.
While its significance as an artistic masterpiece can be summed up by its position above the detergent and dirty socks, its significance to me and my life holds a more prominent placement.
It represents a lifelong friendship. Not with the dog, but with the arts.
The neon acrylics of the early years turned to drawing charcoals and ceramics, with an advanced multimedia class to capstone highschool. Never truly in the “AP artsy” crowd, but building a good rapport. Our friendship blossomed in college. We kept the fundamentals of studio drawing, but broadened the horizons into art history, writing, music, even dance. And most notably, took the first steps at including my other lifelong bestie: science.
Both academically and personally, science and medicine have been permanent fixtures in many facets of my life. North stars that have, intentionally or not, guided the way.
Somewhere between the first grade science teacher with the cool braid down to the floor and learning about the human genome project in ninth grade, my favorite subject became crystal clear: I ultimately majored in Biology. But, a bit more “Biology, with a twist”... loving the required core of (ironically) Immunology and Neuroscience, but also opting for things like writing seminars in molecular clocks, and an independent study in nature inspired printmaking. Spending one January term shadowing an Oncologist/Hematologist, and the next in a course entitled “Study of Sketchbooks”.
At my most medical-geek phase, I was working eight hours a day in a hospital, followed by 3-4 hours of pre-med studying each night. Yet, it was also during this time that I distinctly started to notice, my mind was thinking in art projects. Walking to and from work, I would get flashes of thought for a piece: how tracking commuter patterns from a birds-eye view could create a striking visual; the way sculptures could look like something else from a different angle, or the way research we were studying at the hospital could be visualized, without words. Perhaps all whispers from Creativity that it would not stand for being so clearly kicked to the curb. Or a foreshadow to today, where most of the artwork I create is born of something captured on a walk.
Lastly, I must mention the final member of this budding friendship circle.. though very clearly the Frenemy: Health.
Health, or more specifically, its absence, has breathed its way into my life more than I would have liked. Childhood years of just being the kid who got strep a lot, more athletic injuries than I would have desired, a period of sickness that was thought to be a “stomach infection” in college - all things that didn’t necessarily feel like much to write home about, but required dropping classes, re-arranging extra curriculars, and an entry into the workforce that contained a record breaking number of sick days. In hindsight, some of these experiences were a bit like a constellation of stars stealthily hinting at a broader pattern in the sky, with a picture ultimately making itself loud and clear during recent years of illness, for which no amount of star mapping could have ever ever begun to prepare me.
But as illness has picked me as its companion, I have often picked the arts and sciences as mine.
The intuitive, mysterious, happy accidents of art, and the organic interplay of science and nature all keeping me company.
I have found that they not only both serve me well, but more notably, that they both frequently cross the aisle.
The visual work on this site is itself its own blend: Inspiration found in nature (or the sidewalk), meets watercolor; marker, and pastel, meets Adobe. It was also mostly produced while hooked up to infusions, taking a break on the side of the road, or gritting through a flare... In other words, with the Full Gang in tow.
While I may have peaked early with the laundry room classic, I hope any work you stumble on brings some color to your day.
Green Dog
Emily Wendell, Age 7