Today is something light and easy. Instead of writing about a current thout process, I fumbled around in my collection of disordered links and writings and found some noteworthy work I wished to reflect on. Two artists will be discussed, both biologists. If there was ever a field most abundant for artistic opportunity it would be the world of the walkers, crawlers, squirmers, and sprouters. Organisms are a beautiful realisation of what the laws of our Universe can produce.

David S. Goodsell is a microbiologist in the Department of Molecular Biology at the Scripps Research Institute in La Jolla, California. Explaining Goodsell’s research is for another time. Instead I would like you to picture a cell with its undulating lipid bilayer, its globular nucleus, and its bustle of protein traffic through various complex channels and networks. What colours are the components? Probably a mushy red or the colour of liver. My personal experience with biology has focused on the processes and not the visuals. But now you have constructed a cell in your minds eye, feast yourself on this. I have selected two and presented them below. The first drawing is of a red blood cell, the second drawing is of a cytoplasm’s cytoskeleton.

What draws me to these images is their simple representation of the small units like proteins and filaments by only their defining morphology and shape. It portrays well how chaotic a cell’s world is and yet how ordered this chaos can become.

Ernst Haeckel was the second bio-artist I planned to discuss, but time is short and I want to keep to the tradition of these journals being sputters of thought. Writing long expositions too early in my journaling could cause me to burn out and fail developing this habit.

Ernst Haeckel tomorrow!

Having Goodsell’s art in this post feels like cheating. Just the presence of his grandiose work on my page makes the site look infinitely more picturesque.