Author: cancerartscinetwork

NYC dream: The hipster factor

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
In my 2016 NYC trip, I did a social experiment. 
For the first time in my 13 NYC trips, I visited the city during the month of December and for the first time I went to Rockefeller Plaza during the holidays. Also, I dressed up like a Southern tourist: large, fluffy and colored jackets without far, plaid woolen shirts, bootcut blue jeans, big woolen hats etc etc. The only not so non-New-Yorker thing was my shoe – I wore a pair of designer black boots without a gothic belt and without a cowboy knuckle. 
I blended in with the tourists very well with this attire in the 47th and 5th. But, I couldn’t hide the frustration on my face because of the super slowly moving, awe-inspiringly directionally-challenged, “Ooooh just like the movie Spiderman” screaming and annoyingly blocking everyone else, selfie-taking crowd!
Now, my visits to SoHo, TriBeCa and Little Italy generated a very different response. I would never forget the glare I got from the locals who took one millionth of a second to look at my clothes! This experience got me aware of the New York Hipster factor!
After some observation and research I came to the conclusion that the New Yorker hipsters are in their 20s and 30s, wear knee-high designer black boots even in summer, wear black trench coats and hoodie with far in winter, wear skinny tapered jeans, with a smug look on that can never be bitch-slapped off of their faces, wear their long hair: straight and untied (if identify with the female gender), or in a tight bun (if identify with the male gender), highly aware of the green lifestyle, always height-weight balanced, highly aesthetic about themselves and their surrounding and very kind and friendly to tourists when asked for directions.

Should I do the second phase of the experiment dressing up like a New Yorker hipster in my next visit and see what kind of look I get from the locals in lower Manhattan and from the tourists in Midtown?

NYC dream: To my readers from 10 countries

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Dear Reader,
Today I looked at the audience statistics generated by Blogger for my blog posts. I was surprised and excited to see that my readers are from 10 countries (China, Russia, Malaysia, Portugal, Canada, Germany, UK, France, Ukraine and Brazil) apart from USA. You may be interested in cancer research, or visual art, or New York City or all of them. Whoever you are and whatever your interest is, I hope my blog was and will be informative and enjoyable to you!
Best!

NYC dream: The pipette and the paintbrush

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Back in 2015 when I founded Cancer ART-SCI Network to unite the cancer researchers and artists worldwide to advance prevention, diagnosis and cure for cancer, I had three major goals in my mind. As Valerie Garcia eloquently wrote in her article after interviewing me, these goals were:

1) Informational – communicating complex scientific problems via art to a broader audience, 2) Emotional – providing an expressive avenue to cancer patients to cope with the side effects during their therapy, and, 3) Creative – generating novel ideas and hypothesis to be tested in the scientific labs. I gathered a lot of like-minded people for the first two goals and created significant number of appropriate events over the past two years showing the impact in 20 countries by 189 members of this network. But, the third goal was the most difficult one.

My vision for the third goal was to bring art to the scientific research labs as a way to fill the blind spot in data-driven research – to help scientists understand complex theoretical concepts of cancer where real-life data are not available yet. The major hurdle was to avoid the vicious cycle. Some of the cancer researchers and science writers told me they would consider believing that art can help advance science if I could show them evidence of others reporting so. One way to overcome this was through the documenting evidences through the Art and Cancer section of Leonardo journal from MIT Press. Thankfully, Leonardo’s editor-in-chief who was also a NASA astrophysicist believed in my vision.

Now, I cannot speak for other cancer researchers who dived into practicing art and found benefits in their scientific research. I understand it takes courage to break an ideology as a set of beliefs that art is way too loose to help data-driven, reproducible, statistically significant, evidence based scientific research. Moreover, the value of fighting this battle is not clear to most of the cancer researchers.

But, I can speak for myself. In early 2016, when my scientific article undergoing review at the Cancer Research journal from AACR Press demanded some in vivo data, I utilized that situation as an opportunity to use art and science together to answer a complex question. 

My visual exploration of cancer as a chaotic system
Using lung cancer patients derived cells (in vitro) I have already shown that certain types of lung cancer, even from one patient, may have more than one type of tumor cells and hence more than one therapy could provide a better therapeutic outcome. To show this results held right also in the laboratory animals (in vivo) I had to think about majorly two issues that I didn’t address before: when to begin the treatment and how to space out the treatment. While the thought process leading to the answer of the first question came from my visual exploration of chaotic nature of lung cancer in paintings and mixed media, the exact planning was also based on the previously available scientific data available from the literature and my collaborators from New York.

The second question was trickier. For this one, I studied concept called the “period of intermittency.” Now, in terms of time scale, the period of intermittency is a short period and the tumors can go back being chaotic or unpredictable with a slight increase in growth signal from within the cells or from the microenvironment. Ideally, I wanted to space out the schedule in a way to keep the tumors in the intermittent state at my best efforts. This led to the thought – “how to space out the doses.” This was the artistic intuition part of the process. This is somewhat a balance between how much drug we give to eliminate the cells and how much growth promoting signals the cells are receiving. I was very happy when I observed that my experiment on reducing the growth of lung tumors in animals gave a positive result.

My painting on the period of intermittency in tumor’s evolution
As a scientist, I could have done detailed experiments with different combinations of when to begin and how to space out the treatment to measure toxicity and identify which combination works the best to reduce the tumor burden. But instead of that long and already established route, I followed my artistic intuition. I know I will be criticized by the scientists for this as I do not have a statistical significance, per se, of my artistic intuition. We don’t know if this intuition will work the same way for other therapies in other tumors. But, this is definitely a new way of looking into an existing problem and that’s what artists have done in the history – they always challenged the ideologies and the belief that appeared normal.
In summary, working through precise scientific experiments we tend to forget to take risks. Taking risk is even harder when we are working on a problem on which millions of patients’ lives depend. But, remembering the fact that most of the revolutionary scientific discoveries were done by accidents, I believe we can supplement traditional science with new techniques. The paintbrush from an artist’s studio should never replace the micro-pipette in a scientist’s lab. But, holding on to the paintbrush may provide new ideas from a new consciousness. After all, a very famous scientist once said – “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”

NYC Dream: Adaptation, transformation and genesis

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Two years back while creating paintings based on Swan Lake and choreographing dance forms with Tchaikovsky’s composition, I had no idea how my own life experiences will blend in this adaptation over time and create a new form of mixed media art.

The Indian choreographic adaptation of a
short segment of Swan Lake at the Art
Institute of Dallas.

In Dr. Anne Perry’s Transformation and Adaptation class at the Art Institute of Dallas, I did my final project on three layers of adaptation of Swan Lake. The original Bolshoi ballet Swan Lake inspired Aronofsky’s Black Swan as well as Matthew Bourne’s ballet version. Interestingly, the adaptation of Swan Lake in Stephen Daldry’s 2000 film Billy Elliot was tightly connected with Bourne’s ballet version as Adam Cooper, the principal ballet dancer played 25 year old Billy Elliot in the film.

My medieval style painting was inspired
by Swan Lake and Darren Aronofsky’s 2010
film Black Swan. 

Finally, there were my paintings and choreography of a short segment of Swan Lake shown and performed at the Art Institute of Dallas.

My mixed media piece

Two years later, as I was reflecting on my own life, I realized adaptation evolves over time as we blend in our own experiences with our inspirations. As a result, I combined my earlier sketches on Swan Lake with my personal performance in playing the evil wizard Rothbert. The struggle of emulating the characters combined with fights in my own life, with a little help from gravity created a fluid, biomorphic and somewhat psychedelic mixed media piece with dynamic composition.

As I was creating this piece in my balcony, suddenly it started raining. Appreciating the involvement and the uncertainty of nature, I kept going instead of moving the setup indoor. Interestingly, the rain water went under the acrylic layer soaking through the coffee filter papers and created uneven yet beautiful greenish brown patches under an otherwise blue and turquoise piece. The next day, after drying this piece as I was carrying this to the installation space, a blue Jay flew over my head and dropped off a feather from it’s wing. Taking it as another sign of nature, I picked up the dark blue feather and glued it on the piece. It may not be a Swan feather but I was very happy no matter what.  

NYC dream: Connecting four artists from four corners of the world

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork

This is a tale of three girls and one boy separated by time and space and how they teamed up because of their common passion and experience in inspiring the audience to tell their own stories via art.

Figure 1: Puppet show designed by Elisabeth Schalij at the Museum of American Indian in New York City where children interacted with the puppets created by Elisabeth as a mode of art communication.

Back in 1930s, Netherlands, Elisabeth was growing up with a dream of telling stories like that of Grimm and Anderson. Her fascination with the symbolic meaning and similarities of mythologies made her travel across the seven seas like Sinbad and to reach New York City, USA. After establishing herself as a renowned international artist, she created hundreds of thousands of art shows and workshops all around the world. The most impactful of them was a puppet show at the Children’s museum and Hudson River Museum, New York (Figure 1). With a focus on Native American stories, the puppet show inspired many including the 4th Grade students of Midland School, New York. Cornelia Mason, the 4th grade teacher recalls “How great it was to have the puppet show and especially great (and educational I might add) to have it coordinated with the subject of Indians.” On Elisabeth’s recent book “Snowbear”, a story and illustration of Inuit folklore, Jaap J. Bredee, professor emeritus of Utrecht University, Netherlands writes “I could envision Snowbear to become another classic story about the American Indians, who were treated so terribly in the past.”

Figure 2: Caroline Shaw Ometz teaching her workshop at Mendocino, California in 2013 and inspiring her students to create their own stories, exploration and questions on life in painting. 

In the meantime, as a little girl, Caroline, in 1950’s southern United States always dreamt of teaching art in a way that her students realize their natural creativity. Turning her dreams into reality, a miracle itself in her life, she taught for past 40 years in Creative Arts Center, Craft Guild, Plano Recreation center and Continental Gin Building, Dallas. Building on her own Graduate level training at SMU, UTD and University of Dallas, she provided a nurturing environment for her students to meet their individual creative need. Her most impactful teaching experience is at the Mendocino Art Center, California (Figure 2). Her student, Anne Neal, currently a sculptor herself, recalls “Caroline’s teaching has changed the way I relate to and practice art. From Caroline, I learnt to step away from focusing on techniques and instead focus on the message. I now see space as an opportunity for a fluid dialogue instead of something empty waiting to be filled.” Similarly, Roberto Munguia, Cistercian Preparatory School/ Art Department Head says “Caroline has been a real source of inspiration to our students. She has been able to facilitate their making a deeper connection with their work and to reach beyond technical proficiency towards personal inner vision.”

Figure 3: Shafaq Ahmad explaining her “Mysterious Letters – The Realm of the Hidden”, a 78 piece installation at the Sharjah Museum of contemporary Art, 2016 to the Minister of Art and Education of United Arab Emirates inspiring him about the future of Art Education.

8000 miles away from Caroline, was Shafaq. Born in Rawalpindi, Pakistan, Shafaq has always been drawn to mysticism. She lived in United Kingdom, Iran and Denmark before fully realizing her artistic purpose and settling down in United States. Over past few decades she wore and switched several hats: a BFA student of Virginia Commonwealth University, Richmond, an MFA student of Texas Christian University, Fort Worth, a glass artist collaborating with galleries in Czech Republic and Sweden, and a multimedia artist with many solo and 70 group exhibitions all around the world. Her most impactful work involving interaction with audience and inspiring them was with the Minister of Art and Education at Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (Figure 3). Her work in connecting the contemporary calligraphy presenting mysterious letters, realm of hidden geometric and fractal patterns impacted the audience to create their own form of art and shaped the future of art educational programs in United Arab Emirates. Recently, Deborah Fleck from Dallas Morning News writes about her solo exhibition – “For big, bold and colorful see the paintings of Shafaq Ahmad.”

Figure 4: Dhruba Deb moderating a panel discussion with scientists from University of Texas and artists from Dallas and New York City at LuminArte Gallery in 2016 with his paintings in the background to inspire an audience of 140 to create their own science-based art.

Born in 1980’s Kolkata, India, Dhru had a dream of merging art and science. Just like the North East Indian folklore of “Grandmother’s tales” he flew over thirteen rivers and seven mountains to reach Dallas, Texas. His PhD studies in biomedical science At UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas and BA studies in visual art at University of Hertfordshire, UK, enabled him to communicate complex problems of science via art to a broader audience and to be involved in transforming the education in both elementary (The Hockaday School) and higher level (Center for Art and Technology, UTD). The most impactful of his interactions was at the LuminArte Gallery, Dallas (Figure 4), where he curated and participated in an art show with 50 artworks from 6 artists and scientists and a panel discussion with 2 scientists and 2 artists. This educational event enabled an exchange of knowledge and inspiration to create art of science among 140 audience members. Priscilla Di Thiene, Editor of Le Scienze from Rome recalls “Our magazine deals with a lot of scientific arguments. But, your images published in Le Scienze show such a different way to see, study, understand and approach cancer.”

Figure 5: Example of 4 paintings from 4 artists

In 2016, Dallas, these four artists teamed up realizing their common interest in telling magical stories from around the world and in the process inspiring their audience to share their own stories in visual and literary art. Just like the magical objects in their stories, they plan to utilize paintings, sculptures and storytelling in their workshops to bring out the magical creativity in their audience. Elisabeth’s paintings and story “Markel the Magnificent” (Figure 5, top left) shows how each audience as an individual has the magical ability to bring someone back to life. Caroline’s visuals and writing on “God Quest” (Figure 5, top right) encourages creative thinking and imagination of the audience in finding their inner peace. Shafaq’s paintings and sculptures on “Conference of birds” (Figure 5, bottom right) inspires deep thinking, compassion and will lift the spirit of the audience in pursuing their own creative art form. Dhru’s paintings and story “The gold wand and the silver wand” (Figure 5, bottom left) establishes the audience as heroes who look for ways and means to overcome demon-like diseases in their own lives and in the process shares their own story in visual and literary art. Together these four artists from four corners of the world show the audience that no matter where they are from and where they are now in life, everyone has a story worth telling and if we don’t tell our stories, no one else will. 

NYC Dream: Staycation and apartment therapy

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
In past 6 years I have been to NYC for 13 times. Spending time in NYC doing what I like to do has no substitute. But there are 3 major downsides.
A photo I took on a cloudy night from a high rise at Kips Bay looking down at 33 and 34 St. 
First problem is the huge expenses associated with these trips. To handle this issue I found 3 boutique hotels that are approximately 50% cheaper than Manhattan’s average price per night. One of them is very artistic with lots of murals and fits my mood very well. However, bagging a good deal in flights still remains a lot of work.
The Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral
Second problem is the short span of the trip. Because of many realistic reasons, the NYC trips are always less than a week. Even though I try to squeeze in couple of vacation days after a conference, for me it’s always unsatisfactory. NYC has so much to offer, it’s difficult to experience everything I like in a short trip.
Finally, the stress of traveling wears me out. It’s not a vacation to a relaxing beach lying under the sun and sipping frozen margaritas. My NYC trips are always paired with millions of activities: Giving a talk at the NY LASER meeting for scientists and artists, visiting the galleries and the Leslie-Lohman museum in SoHo, walking around the neighborhoods below and around Canal St, attending interesting talks at MSKCC at Upper east Side, Watching the sunset from DUMBO or Roosevelt island, walking through the Central Park and climbing up to the Belvedere castle, visiting the European sculptures at MET, lunch with family, dinner with friends, both old and new, visiting The Basilica of St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, and the list goes on and on. Squeezing so many activities within a short trip requires planning and there is always stress involved with the chaotic nature of the city.

This year, when I had to cancel my pre-planned NYC trip because of a job interview, I thought I would try something different. Why not bring the elements of NYC that I’m obsessed with to my apartment itself! Why not try an NYC themed staycation instead of a stressful vacation? In that way, I get to enjoy those static elements everyday comfortably and more importantly, I control the time of changing each of these elements. I started with my apartment’s interior decor. I have been a huge fan of Apartment Therapy‘s posts on urban living and multipurpose furniture in small spaces. It was about time to try that in my own apartment.  
I was very happy with the Industrial city look accented by the NYC subway rug and custom built pillow covers. I am attracted to the NYC skyline or the bird’s eye view at night which is printed in greyish blue colors on two of the pillows. For the middle one, I wanted a bit of contrast. Instead of using more images on the print, this time I went with typography. In this pillow cover, each landmark of NYC is written with a typeface mostly associated with it. For example, the word “Broadway” is written with the Broadway typeface. The subway rug would only make sense to people who like me can connect the symbols of each of the subway lines in the city.
Next, I wanted to balance this industrial look with a bit of nature. The arrowhead allusion plant served that purpose well. The acrylic painting on top was one of mine describing the order and chaos of cancer evolution. My interest in MSKCC’s research on cancer and the chaotic nature of the life in the city were represented by this painting. 
As most of my art making materials were stored underneath the daybed and the journals on cancer  research were inside the ottoman serving as the center table, this design decision created a lot of breathing space at the other side of the living room. I built this space around a greenish yellow Chinese lantern (a gift from my friend Maria) hanging almost at the center of this area. Connecting with the natural and minimal Zen look I was going for I placed the plants on top of a wooden bar stool which also held some of the magazines underneath. One of my favorite parts was to use with my top three favorite The New Yorker cover posters.
Next, I started gathering books I wanted to read with stories using NYC in their backdrop. Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy provided detective stories written with several elements of NYC and in a slow, relaxed style. Brian Wood’s The New York Four graphic novel paid homage to many of NYC’s landmarks and neighborhoods. In addition, I loved the illustrations of Ryan Kelly. Joey Esposito and Sean Von Gorman’s graphic novel Pawn shop was the most beautiful of all. The illustration style of Jonathan Moore was not my favorite. But, Joey Esposito’s dedication “For the lonely souls haunting New York City” sealed the deal for me. 

Finally created a Zen nook to relax and meditate in my patio! In the morning, I could use this space to read those books I collected. In the evening I could enjoy a drink or two. Now this is a lot larger than a typical 35 square feet NYC patio. But, I needed a little escape to calm down my mind. I used the colors I am drawn to (shades of green and blue) and a small succulent (flowering plants are way too high maintenance and do not fit my lifestyle). I hanged some of the quotes from spiritual leaders from many religions that help to calm me down.

I believe by doing this exercise of bringing NYC close to me, I finally realized the saying by Rumi – “This universe is not outside of you. Look inside yourself; everything you want you already are.” While dealing with my obsession of living in NYC for past couple of years, I didn’t notice when I turned into a New Yorker at heart and wherever I go people notice that New Yorker vibe in me!


NYC Dream: The charging bull vs. the fearless girl

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork

The Fearless girl sculpture by Kristen Visbal in Wall Street indeed drew a lot of media attention. The placement of Fearless girl in front of the Charging bull by Arturo Di Modica was extremely strategic! As the charging bull represents financial power of Wall Street (or capitalism in America) in influencing world-level decisions, the fearless girl can be studied as an icon of millennials taking a stand against “life-long debt” imposed on individuals in a capitalist country. On the other hand the impact is further augmented by placing a girl’s sculpture instead of that of a boy. The story of David and Goliath is pretty famous. But “Diana and Goliath” was cleverly timely with the Wonder Woman film doing so well in the box office!

NYC Dream: the obsession, the dilemma and the truth

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
I am back after more than two years. I believe I do not have a lot of followers. So I don’t feel guilty. Trust me, last two years have been tough. I dealt with a lot of psychological issues circling around decision making about life. My New York dream could have become a reality on a very steep price through various avenues. But, I chose to remain as a tortured artist (and a scientist) in Southern United States and fantasize about living in New York City, specifically in SoHo. I knew New York City is the source of my creativity. The urge of placing my foot in that city for 3-5 days a year keeps me creative for the rest of the 360 days each year. I knew if I actually ended up living there, I probably would have quit creating. To pay for the sky-high rent, I would have forced myself into finance and management. The artist in me would have died and rotted without being able to express freely.  So I decided to stay. Even though all SIX of my senses were complaining about the lifestyle and culture down here.
As a big compensation I curated and participated in a cancer based art show bringing in 6 artists and cancer researchers in one of the top 5 galleries in the Design District of Dallas and installed 35 pieces of artworks worth $1.5 million. My cancer researcher boss kindly served as one of the four panelists along with visionaries and famous scholars from the field of astrophysics, art therapy, business and spirituality. More importantly, my scientist boss’ artist sister flew in from San Diego to watch this show. The evening I moderated this panel discussion, I received the best reward of my life. Both my lung cancer and art mentors exclaimed in union to 140 audience members (and to my embarrassment) “I wish all my students were like Dhru!” That was just the beginning.

The editor-in-chief of Leonardo, the second best visual art journal according to Google h5 index, agreed to create a special section named “Art and Cancer” on my request. I paid off by serving as the section editor and creating an editorial advisory board inspiring and enlisting a senior editor from prestigious Science magazine. In April of this year, Leonardo published their top 2 articles on art and cancer and I wrote the very first editorial of my life!

But, back in my mind, somewhere was that screaming artist soul that wanted to live in New York City at any cost. One opportunity came up as I was sitting beside the president of consulting club in a departmental seminar. I didn’t know anything about management consulting except from the fact that it might provide the ways and means for me to live in New York. The president is a very kind human being and irrespective of my lack of experience in consulting agreed to become my study partner for interviews in the biggest consulting firms. For the next 10 months, I worked my ass off to practice case studies with several consulting club members and real life consultants, networked with more than 100 consultants in 25 firms in 5 different countries and lost 35 lbs of weight to look presentable and confident. Even I started to believe I wanted to be a consultant.
Guess what? I didn’t make it. I kept lying to myself – “It doesn’t matter if you are a management consultant. You can still be an artist even though you work on business stuff 80 hours a week!” And there was the other voice – “Really???” I think the very intelligent and experienced consultants who interviewed me saw through me clearly, noticed my dilemma and they knew I was not ready.
But there was a plus point from all this pain. You know how consultants are really good at breaking down a problem and solving it creatively? I got good at that too through all these hardcore preparations. I started to think about what is it about New York City that I like? And then it occurred to me slowly. I like the creative culture. I like the young people wearing black clothes and walking fast down the streets. I like the dynamic, ever-changing and sometime fleeting aspects of life, a sense of un-satisfaction and practically the ability to walk anywhere I wanted. The uncertainty of life at every aspect of every day and being able to make peace with it.
  

NYC dream: How to study Art History

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Art History is our story from the past. The one and only possible way of studying the past is via documentation created in the past. Unfortunately, in the field of Art History, the process of documentation or cataloguing did not follow any objective rules. Hence, our evaluation of the history of art is rather subjective and biased by our individual opinion and assessments. In the following essay, I will review different ways in which Art History has been studied from the Renaissance to the present day. In the end, I will also provide my personal opinion on which methodology offered the most interesting analysis of the past.

To understand the art during Renaissance period, we need to study the ideas of ancient Greek and Roman authors and philosophers. The question, “What is beauty?” always intrigued the scholars and artists in ancient days. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle and Cicero, described “beauty” with specific lexicons – harmony and proportion, fantasy, elegance and vitality. In addition, the history of ancient Greek paintings written by the Roman author Pliny the Elder in his encyclopedia “Natural History” influenced the art during Renaissance. Pliny’s writings were verified by later discovery such as the signature of three sculptors on the sculpture piece “Laocoon”. In addition, Giorgio Vasari’s book named “’The Lives of the Most Excellent Italian Architects, Painters, and Sculptors” provided a biological model, where art, like living beings, is born, grows, ages and dies. Vasari also focused on the personal style of each artist. This consideration of individual personalities of artists provided a novel layer to art connoisseurship.

During 18thcentury, the focus of the study moved from the biographies and personalities of artists to the development costs. Winckelmann was a proponent of this idea. Like Vasari, he clarified that there were no universal rules for critiquing or creating the beauty in art.

In 19th century, Art History became connected to museums and Universities and was considered as an academic discipline. During 19th and early 20thcentury, some earlier hinted concepts were developed as key theme of paintings. Two such concepts are “Formalism” and “reflection of spirit of time”. Formalism dealt with the idea that art forms had the life of their own and they evolved over time following natural rules of evolution. The reflection of the spirit of time, also known as “Zeitgeist” can be understood using the Elder of Pieter Bruegel as an example where a general mentality of the people is reflected in the themes of fear, violence and death in art.

In late 19th and early 20th century, the study of context in which the art was made gained importance. It is also during this time, when credible cataloguing of art started. There were growing skepticism towards universal categorization of art and belief on fragmented and individualized process of Art History. Guy Billout’s illustration of Jacques Derrida, a philosopher, looking at his own reflection is an example of this theme.

In recent years, Art History is more aware of the socio-economic conditions under which art was created. The analysis of art history has also evolved as now art historians combine techniques from other disciplines such as science to study the evolution of art. One such example is Maximmilan Schich’s paper titled “Quantitative social science. A network framework of cultural history” published in Science magazine where Schich has reconstructed aggregate intellectual mobility of more than 150,000 artists all around the world over two millennia through the documentation of their birth and death locations. He used tools from graph theory to locate historical trends of cultural centers beyond the scope of specific, isolated events and narrow time intervals. Hence, my personal opinion of the best methodology of studying art history is by collecting and analyzing data from the credible catalogue of art works all around the world over many years.  

NYC dream: Being a Paradisciplinary Sci- Artist

Posted on by cancerartscinetwork
Abstract

Biomedical art-science collaboration networks are flooded with inter, cross, multi and trans – disciplinary collaborative works among artists and scientists from various areas. But, the number of paradisciplinary “sci-artists” who practice both science and art professionally in parallel, is rare. In this research paper, I report three polymaths: Leonardo Da Vinci, Alfred L. Copley, and Francois Joseph Lapointe, from three periods of human history who have been paradisciplinary “sci-artists” and have made excellent contribution to both biomedical science and art. Through these examples and my personal experience of becoming a cancer sci-artist, this paper discusses the challenges in becoming “sci-artists” and possible ways to overcome them to inspire single individuals interested in dual careers.

Introduction

Biomedical science and fine or performance art collaborative projects have become a popular area of art-science collaboration research in recent years (1,2). But, there are several problems in collaboration among multiple biologists and artists in the field of biology based art, as Francois Lapointe discusses in his SEAD white paper (3). First, the biologist may be used as a technician in the process of collaboration without any formal recognition of scientific contribution to the creative process. In this case, the biomedical science only provides a context for the artists to create their art works. Second, the artist may assume that he/she is doing science while only participating in the process of science. Lack of expertise and knowledge in literature review, hypothesis formulation, series of experiments to test such hypothesis for the artist would delay any advancement of science via this art-science project whatsoever (3). One solution to such problems is – paradisciplinarity, where a single individual rigorously learn and practice both biomedical science and art at the same time.

In paradisciplinarity, the individual should perform both the disciplines in parallel in a synchronous manner. For example: a neurobiologist who studies patterns of information flow through the neurons in a diseased condition and paints neurons will fit this criterion; but, a neurobiologist who changed career to become an actor does not (E.g. Mayim Bialik, who plays “Amy Farah Fowler” on “Big Bang Theory” had a Ph.D. in Neuroscience. But she gave up research to become an actor (4)). Additionally, the importance and involvement of each disciplinary practice should be relatively symmetrical in the curriculum of an individual. For example: a composer who publishes scientific papers in acoustics and also performs in a concert hall professionally and regularly will meet this criterion. A physicist who publishes studies on string theory in scientific journals and paints as a hobby at home does not. Strictly speaking, a “sci-artist” is a scientist and an artist at the same time with experience in scientific methodologies and artistic practices.

Although such paradisciplinary sci-artists are rare, it is not entirely impossible to find such example in the history of mankind. The very first golden age of improvements in both biology and art began during the renaissance period. Leonardo Da Vinci was called “The Renaissance Man” for a reason. Unlike other artists like Rafael, Michelangelo etc., Da Vinci was a painter, sculptor, architect, musician, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist and writer. He is a perfect example of a polymath and sci-artist. Later, in 20th century, Alfred L. Copley can be considered as another biomedical sci-artist who practiced medicine, as a biologist studied the flow of blood through vascular system of human, and as a painter created the flow of liquid using abstract expressionism techniques on canvas. Finally, Francois Joseph Lapointe in 21st century, is the third example of a biomedical sci-artist who had two Ph.D.s: one in evolutionary biology in 1992 and the second is in dance in 2012. Currently, he works on human genome research in his lab at University of Montreal, as well as choreographing creative dance forms for various performances around the world. These three exceptional polymaths and biomedical sci-artists are discussed in the next section.

Leonardo Da Vinci: The Renaissance Man

Leonardo Da Vinci epitomizes the boldness of the Renaissance, when the confidence in the capabilities of man led to the idea that they could excel in many activities. Born in 1452, Leonardo was trained in Florence, and he was very much the product of the cultural and artistic environment of that city. He worked for the court of the Medici family there. Later for many years in Milan for the ruler of the city, Ludovico Sforza, he worked as an artist and as a military engineer. At the end of his life he was called to France by king Francis I. He died during 1519 (5, 6).

His interest in art and science were linked to each other, like two sides of the same coin. Figure 1 shows a drawing by Leonardo. It shows studies of the way water behaves when interrupted by foreign object and, at the bottom of the image, when falling from some height on to a pool. Here, the intention of the artist is not to draw a snapshot of a beautiful thing, it is to understand the way the current of water behaves. His tool for doing this is drawing. Interestingly, at that time fractals (self repeating units) were not known to the mathematicians. Neither did scientists understand the interaction of order (predictability) and chaos (unpredictability) in a complex system. However, Leonardo’s drawing and his notes clearly shows that he started to understand the behavior of complex systems using flow of water as an example (7).

He studied human body as a complex systems and he drew many parts of it. Figure 2 shows his drawing, Vitruvian Man, where the proportion of human body was studied. Even today, artists practicing figure drawing, character designing and animation follow these simple rules of proportions of human body studied by Leonardo. As is the case today, imaging was in the forefront of scientific research at the time, and Leonardo was a leader in this field. Painting was only one of the many activities in which he excelled. We only know approximately thirteen paintings by Leonardo, depending on whether we accept or not a few attributions in them, and several of these paintings are damage or unfinished. In spite of this he was enormously influential (5).

The largest Art – Science research community founded by Frank Malina in 1982 was named after this legendary Sci-artist – Leonardo, International Society of Art, Science and Technology.

Alfred L. Copley: One man two visions

Alfred Lewin Copley was born on June 19, 1910 in Germany. He resided in Dresden until the age of 20. Then he moved from one city to another in Europe staying for short time in each city such as in Berlin, Frankfurt, Heidelberg, and Basel. After he completed his studies at medical school, he moved to New York City to work as a medical practitioner in 1937. At this point, in addition to practicing medicine, he started taking both practice based and theoretical art classes. He became an U.S. citizen in 1943 and mostly resided in New York City till 1952. He spent 2 years in Paris and then finally settled at 50 Central Park West in New York City. He passed away in 1992 (8).


As a scientist, Copley studied “rheology” (Greek Rheo – Flow, and Logia – Study of) i.e. the study of the flow of matter, primarily in a liquid state, but also as ‘soft solids’ or solids under conditions in which they respond with plastic flow rather than deforming elastically in response to an applied force (9). In 1948 he introduced the word “biorheology” to describe rheology in biological systems (10). In 1952 he introduced the word “hemorheology”, to describe the study of the way blood and blood vessels function as part of the living organism (11). In 1966 he established the International Society of Hemorheology, which changed its name and scope in 1969 to the International Society of Biorheology (ISB) (9). In 1972 the ISB awarded him its Poiseuille gold medal (9).

Alfred took up the artist name Alcopley while residing in New York City. He is well known for his abstract expressionist paintings (Figure 4). In 1949 he was one of twenty artists who founded the Eighth Street Club. The group also included Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning and Alcopley’s close friend, the composer Edgard Varèse (12). He participated in the Ninth Street Show in 1952 and had a solo exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1962 (9) His work is held in the collection of the National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo (9).


Alfred believed in both art and science as two major paths towards the exploration of nature and the advancement of human knowledge.  In 1991 he wrote – “The notion that art and science are contradictory originated with Nietzsche, who considered art as the highest form of human activity. In recent years the assumption has been made that art and science or, in general, the humanities and science, represent two different ‘cultures’ opposing each other. I do not share such a view, as it appears to me that its proponents do not gasp the similarity or identity of the creative side of two of teh most noble activities of our species. This was not as evident at the time of Nietzsche as it is now” (8).

Francois Joseph Lapointe: Dual Ph.D. in science and art

Francois Joseph Lapointe, born in Quebec, Canada is a contemporary polymath. He earned his B.Sc. in Biological Sciences from the University of Montreal in 1988. In 1992, he finished his Ph.D. in Evolutionary Biology from The University of Montreal. His research area includes Phylogenetic Analysis – phylogenomics, Population Genetics – Molecular Ecology, Conservation biology of endangered species, and Biostatistics – mathematical modeling (13). Interestingly, while working as an assistant professor at the university, he enrolled in a Ph.D. in dance program. He choreographed precise movement at each nucleotide in the genome of the dancers so that they could interpret their own DNA. In addition to his thesis submission in 2012, he created a public performance with 30 professional and semi-professional dancers (14).


On a personal communication (15), Francois wrote to me – “To make a long story short about myself, I must admit that is has been a very long and “interesting” journey to become an art scientist (although I doubt it every day). The thing is that when you expect to have a dual career and want to be successful at both, you must work twice as hard, or accept that you’ll have to be less successful than if you were doing only one thing – science OR art – and not two things at once – science AND art. My own opinion on this is that I will never be fully recognized as a bona fide artist. However, what I do as an “artist” cannot be done without my science training, and without having access to a science lab. For me, being an art scientist is not about being a scientist who also can do art, or being an artist who plays with science. It is more like having a split personality. When I do science, I think as a scientist. When I am doing art, I try to think as an artist (this is the difficult part since the scientist is always looking over my shoulder). Foremost, I see my role and that of others like me as that of an intercessor between two worlds, a translator between two languages.


About how to do it? Don’t know the best way. Not sure that you need a formal education in art, or maybe just practicing art on a daily basis. For me, doing a second PhD in art was not about getting the PhD. It was more a challenge to push myself by meeting on a regular basis with my fellow students in art. Otherwise, I would have stayed home, waiting for a miracle to happen. It takes a lot of energy to succeed in art, probably more than succeeding in science. There is less money, more competition, and it is highly subjective. You become fashionable in a flash and disappear the next day. Very unlikely in science, where it’s more about the data than your personality”.

Cancer Research and Fine Art – a personal experience

I have always carried out experiments in scientific research during the day and practiced various art forms during the night. But, in recent years, they have become very strongly connected. Being in cancer research, a field where many scientists are trying to first understand and then cure a very complicated disease, I have observed that the general public, although affected by the disease on a direct or indirect level, do not understand the complexities dealt with in this research field. In addition, for cancer researchers creative thinking becomes a necessity of utmost importance. I tried to address these problems in my own way.

There are certain individuals who are active visionaries and proponents in art-science collaboration fields. They have been of great motivation and help to me. Cynthia Pannucci, the founder and director of Art Science Collaboration Inc, New York, and Dr. Roger Malina, Executive editor of the Leonardo journal, MIT Press, Massachusetts have been of great help in my art-science journey so far. My Ph.D. mentor, Dr. John Minna, the director of Hamon Center of Therapeutic Oncology Research at UT Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas has been very supportive of my interest and practice in cancer based art. I have also been very fortunate to meet and learn art from excellent artists such as Caroline Shaw Ometz, Denny Doran and Dr. Anne Gordon Perry.


I’m defending my Ph.D. thesis titled “Oncogene-induced signaling heterogeneity in lung cancer” at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center, Dallas, Texas in June, 2015. In the same month, I’m starting classes in the BA (Hons) Illustration program from the University of Hertfordshire, UK. I am working on a cancer -art collaboration project called “Cancer: Finding beauty in the beast” with four Dallas based artists. My first cancer-art paper was published in Leonardo journal in May, 2015 (17). I will continue to grow and learn in my journey of becoming a paradisciplinary cancer sci-artist.

Conclusion

It is not easy to become successful in dual careers that are not perceived as well-connected in popular culture. As Francois pointed out clearly, to have two successful careers in parallel, one needs to work twice as hard. There are several general problems associated with such a career path such as difficulties in combining the quantitative and qualitative matrices in both the fields, lack of comparison of different curricula, lack of enough hands on experience of the mediators in both the fields, and difficulties in acquiring funding. In addition, for individuals interested in such art-science career may need to deal with problems associated with the lack of visionaries in art-science field in their specific geographical locations.

The National Academies Keck Futures Initiative at Irvine, California wrote an interesting summary of the problem in contemporary discourse in 2015 (18). To quote them – “The Renaissance has been described as an “integrative period” of unified knowledge – a time during which art and science were one. Homo Universalis, or polymaths, embraced a proficient understanding of art, architecture, science and engineering, leading to a period of wondrous discovery. A shift from integration to specialization occurred over time, which some presume has separated the domains of knowledge and experience and contributed to distinct cultures. Have the cultures really become distinct? There are multiple examples of collaborations ranging from American painter Abbot Thayer’s invention of camouflage to composer George Antheil and actress Hedy Lamarr’s collaboration that led to the invention of “frequency hopping” – the encryption technology on cell phones that helps to prevent messages from being intercepted. Stents used to treat aortic aneurysms were designed using the principles of origami, and Kenneth Snelson’s “tensegrity” sculptures have created a new form of engineering and have helped biologists explain the shapes of cells. Every frontier of human inquiry is art-science in nature in that intuition and imagination are equal partners to deduction and precision. The question is not whether art, design, science, engineering, and medicine are distinct and should be fully integrated, but how do they meet to serve as the bookends for innovation”.

References

1. Pandilovski, M. (2008). Art in the biotech era. Adelaide: Experimental Art Foundation.
2. Reichle, I. (2009). Art in the age of technoscience: Genetic engineering, robotics, and artificial life in contemporary art. New York: Springer.
3. Lapointe, F.J. (2012). How I became an “art [scient] ist”: A tale of paradisciplinarity, SEAD white paper, , accessed on June 11, 2015.
4. Mayim Bialik on Wikipedia , accessed on June 11, 2015.
5. EdX course UC3Mx: CEH.1-ENx Explaining European Paintings, 1400 to 1800, Lecture 11: Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519). Knowledge and Beauty in the High Renaissance, , accessed June 11, 2015.
6. Fremantle, R. (1992) God and Money: Florence and the Medici in the Renaissance, Leo S. Olschki Editore.
7. Da Vinci, L. (Unknown), translated by Richter J.P. (2014), The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci: Complete & Illustrated, CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform.
8. Alcopley L. (1993), compiled by Silberberg A. One Man- Two Visions: L. Alcopley- A. L. Copley, Artist and Scientist- A Retrospective, on the Occasion of an Eightieth Birthday, Pergamon Press.
9. Alfred L. Copley in Wikipedia , Accessed on June 11, 2015.
10. E. A. O’Rear et al. (2004) Rheology Bulletin Vol. 73, No. 2 “International Society of Biorheology”.
11. J. F. Stoltz, Megha Singh, Pavel Riha, (1999). Hemorheology in Practice, IOS Press.
12. Steven Johnson (2002) The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts, Routledge.
13. Francois Joseph Lapointe on University of Montreal , accessed on June 11, 2015.
14. Francois Joseph Lapointe’s website , accessed on June 11, 2015.
15. Gewin, V. (2013). Interdisciplinarity: Artistic merit. Nature, 496: 537-539.
16. Personal communication via email.
17. Leonardo Journal just accepted, MIT Press, , accessed on June 11, 2015.
18. Keck Future Initiative website , accessed on June 11, 2015.