From lab notes to sketchbooks
Thinking through biology by drawing and painting
Biologists used to draw more. In the early days of fields like cell theory, neuroscience, and botany, scientists might publish careful ink drawings of their observations from the microscope. Today, capturing an image of something microscopic is a matter of setting up the appropriate software and saving a high-resolution digital photo.
But even in the digital age, I—along with many artists and scientists—have often found myself compelled to draw the subjects of microscopic studies. Or to paint them, or to render them in collage or messy pastels, trying to do justice to bright bodies on black fields. Moving from lab notes to sketchbooks in perhaps unscientific-looking picture-making sessions, I’ve found surprising new ways to think of my biological subjects.
The limits of scientific images
First, some background: I recently got the opportunity to publish a work of writing, microscopy, and painting in the Chaos & Control issue of Maquette. To open the piece, titled “Order Is Only Abstract,” I ask: “How can we represent microscopic bodies?” I discuss the work of Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the stifled artist turned pioneering anatomist who, in the 1890s, popularized the (correct) theory of the brain’s composition out of separate neurons by drawing what he saw when he looked at brain slices through a microscope: individual cells.1 I discuss my own neuron microscopy carried out over a century later, and my own picking-out of individual cells in the brains of C. elegans roundworms—achieved not by drawing but through genetically introduced fluorescent tags, which can make one living cell glow at a time under laser light and conceal its surroundings in blackness.
From the article:
The imaging of solitary cells has allowed great insights into neuron biology: intracellular processes, activity patterns, morphology. Yet the individualization of cells has become standard to the point of normativity. The reality of the brain’s cellular nature was a hard-won and innovative insight of Ramón y Cajal and contemporaries. But if the pendulum swings too far, if all we ever see is the individual neuron, we may come to unknowingly neglect the reality of the body all around.
In the Maquette article, I focus on these invisible cellular surroundings, grappling with what I see as the oversimplified neatness of the microscopic picture (more on this later). But this is only one example of a more general concern of mine: that norms that arise from scientific progress can end up constraining biological thinking, narrowing the possible ways of seeing a body via specific, prescribed practices of image production—across genetic engineering, sample preparation, capturing, processing, and interpretation.
In microscopy, we manipulate pictures to fit preconceived notions of form, and discard images that don’t fit expectations. To maintain focus on that individual cell, for instance, we try to erase background noise and interloping cellular material. Looking is often a means to an end: a clean and comprehensible biological outcome, interpretable within a familiar framework. Usually, expectation-defying images are never circulated, or even acquired and reviewed by scientists in the first place. This is exacerbated by the strict visual culture of scientific posters, presentations, and papers.2
What if we want other ways to see? Ramón y Cajal drew what he saw, and saw past scientific orthodoxy and even literal fact3 to a now-accepted biological reality; scientific advancement often comes from unexpected places, from new ways of looking. Also for artistic ends, for aesthetic pleasure, or just for fun—what if we tried to look beyond the normative limits of the scientific microscopic image, of the “publication-quality” picture, and saw what happened?
The question becomes: How else can we represent microscopic bodies?
Drawing to study
“For the artist drawing is discovery,” writes John Berger. “It is the actual act of drawing that forces the artist to look at the object in front of him, to dissect it in his mind’s eye and put it together again; or, if he is drawing from memory, that forces him to … discover the content of his own store of past observations.”4
In science, drawing is usually carried out from memory; it’s a tool of communication, a product of stored observations. Teacher diagrams a cell’s structure on the board; student tries to recreate it on a test. Researcher and supervisor draw out a workflow, picturing the range of expected outcomes. Most scholarship around drawing in science is focused on judging drawings’ representational abilities, analyzing strategies for illustrating phenomena like cell growth or movement, sometimes dissecting the interpretations and beliefs, or the norms, with which drawings are laden. “Scientists imagine new relations, test ideas, and elaborate knowledge through visual representations.”5
For now, though6, probing my own experiences, I want to dive deeper into drawing as discovery, as study—drawing that “forces the [scientist] to look at the object in front of him,” to learn the subject’s boundaries and proportions, its internal structures, its relationship to its surroundings.
The first time I tried to reproduce a neuron picture on the page, I ended up with an unrecognizable result. This is how the first sketch of any subject goes for me. It may be a face or a bird or the curve of a mountain. It may be a cell. It always starts out wonky, disproportionate, and unattractive. The first sketch is a process of learning the shapes and relationships, working out which lines do and don’t belong. Hyper-focused on an inch of space (or a micrometre, as it may be), I notice things I didn’t at first glance, indispensable details that hold the subject’s form together: a stray feather, a tiny jutting rock, a fold in the corner of the eye, a subtle crook in the long axon tail.
The second drawing is always truer. I work off the reference and the first sketch, going much faster and with a much better sense of the shape of things. And the process iterates. By the third time, I know the subject’s outlines. I must learn something about its depths too, because the outlines are a product of the surroundings, the space around and behind and in front that pins up the very limited slice of the world which happens to intersect with the face of my subject I am attempting to depict. To represent such a cross-section, you need to consider the whole three-dimensional world around it, or at least imagine that you do.
In biology, the practice of learning subjects by drawing them—standard in Ramón y Cajal’s time—has all but disappeared in the age of photography and digital image production. In today’s practice of microscopy, there are no first drafts and no sketches. How many ink-smeared sheets must Ramón y Cajal have cast aside in his work? How many off-by-a-crook neuronal networks must have grown up under his pen to land, crumpled, in the garbage? Through drawing, how much did he learn, and what levels of intimacy did he cultivate with the brain? At the end of all his study came his iconic drawings, beautiful and scientifically invaluable, the information- and interpretation-dense products of deep, intimate biological understanding. In drawing, he could assert form; in form, he found function.
As I draw C. elegans neurons, I learn them. I become more attentive to their forms, noticing what varies cell to cell and what stays the same, feeling out where the body thins and thickens, remembering the three-dimensionality belied by the microscopic cross-section. I imagine how the neuron presses up against its surroundings, the ever-communicating neighbours, the body all around, which, in drawing, I cannot come to neglect.
These are the sketch iterations that really sparked my previously-mentioned preoccupation with the pictured neuron’s surroundings. In the left sketch, the attentiveness of drawing has forced me to notice something outside the body of the neuron—a floating speck of green. On the right, the impulsive addition of colour—a dull attempt to capture the ghostly character of the neon neuron in the dark—has gotten me thinking about the real nature of the field’s blackness.
Painting to deconstruct
My drawn studies were carried out from heavily processed microscopic photos, not from seeing the neuron as a figure artist might see a live model. I had to contend with the fact that there’s no such thing as a raw look at the microscopic subject, particularly when it comes to fluorescence microscopy. Genetic modifications and laser light and image capture parameters are always in effect.
Of course, without this processing, there would be no looking at all. Though it’s limited, we need some window into the microscopic, some way to see anything that’s there. The consequence is that a drawn study is bound up in the picture of reality that the microscope is capable of capturing, in all the assumptions and prescriptions that come along with such technological mediation.7 Even Ramón y Cajal’s brain slices were manipulated: fixed and stained with silver nitrate.
I find that by painting, I can look through the microscopic window with more intentionality, keeping in mind the nature of the glass. With colour and texture as opposed to flat delineation—working in interconnected fields instead of clean, assertive boundary lines—I find it more natural to question the picture the microscope can show me, and my assumptions about the biological body I see. A drawing lays the groundwork for its own interrogation in paint. It becomes clear that clean lines cannot suffice to represent a reality of light and colour and depth variations.
Here’s an example: When I paint a neuron, I need to deal with the nucleus, the round distinct form in the middle of the cell body. With a pencil, I simply set out its border with a circle. So drawing gets the nucleus onto my radar, but when I paint, it becomes the subject of a more conscious choice. Do I spread pigment around the edges of the nucleus, leaving it in negative space? Do I paint the cell as a kind of background and form the nucleus on top, in thick impasto or with another colour? Under the microscope, the nucleus disappears into the same blackness as the background. In my painting, is it behind the body, or on top? Is there another way to represent it within?
In fact, background is missing from this first painted sketch completely, leaving the nucleus to no possible fate other than negative space. This is an oversight, a focus on the individual cell; I have reproduced the microscope’s illusion of the solitary neuron. I feel the need to deal with this before I can think about the nucleus. Here, we return as promised to my focus in the Maquette article.
So, I think—when I include a background, or maybe a field of surrounding, what choices do I make? My instinct is to create a thin watercolour background, and lay oils on top to denote real, solid objects. To think it through, my brush wanders off to a more familiar kind of scene. In a landscape painting, this would correspond to a weak watercolour sky, and a thick oil forest and lake. But isn’t the “background” also present and solid—the sky above and around the forest, the invisible body contents surrounding my cell? This is where I come to the landscape sketches I present in Order Is Only Abstract. Forest, sky, and lake stand in for cell, field, and body.
When I deal with the background/surroundings, I need to address that floating speck. Is it background? Is it solid? It’s not connected to the neuron at hand; it’s some fluorescence happening in another part of the body. If I represent neuron and speck as both solid, with a thin empty background, I’m taking the microscope’s vision at face value. Green signal is object, blackness is emptiness. Doesn’t this neglect the reality that the speck points out—that the whole field is alive and breathing? I find it more honest to make the background solid, too. If I represent the scene as full and vital, a thick living cross-section of which some part sometimes happens through my manipulations to light up under the laser, I feel that I’m doing more justice to the biological body under study. Now, a whole system comes together. In the body, the green neuron couldn’t survive and fluoresce without the life of its interconnected surroundings. In the painting, the dark takes on an analogous active role, working as contrast to make the light visible, both equally solid.
I want to push past this discovery into a new angle. I lay down a solid field, understanding it to be a cross-section of a living body, and I carve out my neuron’s form, turning off the laser light. In white, I reference the original fluorescence that let me see the picture at all. But the white mark stands for the speck, the unexpected signal that helped me think through the fluorescent-nonfluorescent dyad in the first place. I pick it out from the rest of the field, this time with intention, and seeing my window of sight for what it is. This is a representational move driven by choice instead of assumption. I point out the unwanted noise, ask what it is and what it’s doing there.
You might notice a piece cut from the side of this last sketchbook page. It went to serve a completely separate microscope image, one which I want to go over to finally, cleanly lay out the whole process of reference → drawing → painting → deconstruction → new choices.
Reference: I acquired this microscope image during an undergrad research project, studying how stress affects cells. A strange blobby shape caught my eye. It looks like multiple overlapping cells, the middle cell having a strange elongated shape. There are other unusual features, like the shape and size of the nuclei.
Drawing: I started trying to understand this shape by drawing it. On the right is my first attempt to make sense of the form. I first drew the basic outline in pencil. The sketch changed my mind on something: earlier, I had thought the form looked like three cells. On closer inspection, after I was forced to draw the contours more closely, I decided it looked more like four.
Painting: On top of the sketch, I coloured the light and dark areas using grey watercolour. In the process, I found myself attending to some of the white dots along the boundary. Did these once belong to this cell/set of cells? To a neighbour? I also noticed a few tiny dark spots in the cell/s. Little organelles? Nuclei?
Deconstruction: On the left, I produced a more abstract copy of the cell/s, iterated straight from the first sketch without any drawing. Here, I tried to forget the outlines I had imposed on the first depiction. I wanted to look at the form as a whole, dissolving individual identities. Is this one extremely oddly-formed cell, or an overlapping cluster? Why are they so close? Even if they’re individuals, do they form a functional collective?
As I went, I also got more and more concerned with the strange multi-nucleations of my subject, and of its neighbours. Here is where we get back to the earlier nucleus problem, and to the paper cutout.
New choices: In the end, I revisited the earlier nucleus problem while also tackling the unclear identity of the cell quartet. I ended up using collage to give each element of the picture its own plane. The background is a solid field of oil paint, unlit but substantive, like in the earlier neuron painting. The bright, solid fluorescence of the cells is represented in paper; the cell quartet is both merged in paper form and individually delineated in pencil. Finally, the nuclei in black oil sit atop and travel with the fluorescent paper, marking out an identity bound up with the cell and distinct from, despite visual similarity to, the black field. At this incomplete stage, I haven’t yet decided whether some of the nuclei in the quartet will overlap the pencil lines to cast doubt on the accuracy of my set boundaries.
Closing remarks on chaos & control
Drawing a picture is like second nature, especially to a scientist. Close control over a pencil is reasonably assured, give or take a few wobbly lines. What’s in your mind will more or less end up on the page.
Under the surface of all of the sketches I presented here, and in my opinion crucial to the thought paths I went down, was a lack of total control. I’m not a master artist by any means, and I’ve never been the most meticulous with my paints. It takes much more effort to make a brush do what I want compared to a pencil. So sometimes, a brushstroke produces something that can’t be laden with my interpretations and assumptions, because I didn’t intend for it to happen. And such a mismatch, or mistake, opens up new possibility space.
Something unexpected and unfamiliar emerges before your eyes. Something appears in the painting that doesn’t come from the reference photo. Maybe you toss the page out, but maybe you ask what that something could mean, or be, or whether it really could fit into your picture. In one of my neuron sketches, I accidentally disconnected the tail from the body. I misjudged when I was trying to reduce pressure to create a thin segment in a continuous line, and the brush lifted all the way off the page. If I followed that line of thought, I’d have to ask whether the apparent thinning was the result of an actual narrowing in the neuron’s body, or a bend out of the image plane in three-dimensional space, or whether the fluorescence was simply dimmer in that spot and the cell wasn’t any different at all. That would probably lead me to question the uniformity of the fluorescence in the cell, ask how the cell was internally producing and directing the fluorophores, etc., etc….8
I could even lean into the fiction of the broken neuron and ask what happens if I treat two halves of the neuron as completely separate entities, as distinct from each other as the neuron is to the mysterious speck…9
In this way, painting becomes not only deconstructive but speculative. As the representation is made, it changes the maker’s understanding and vision of what’s possible. Some of the thought process is externalized to the page, outside of the body and mind of the scientist/artist, outsourced to the paint itself. Accidental byproducts of the mark-making process lead to emergent properties of representations with meanings and interpretations of their own to discover, if we go looking.
This is where much scholarship of visual representation falls a little short for me—it assumes perfect control over the medium. I’d like to know more about what happens in the space between intention and representation. I’d like to give more legitimacy to mistakes or wonks or inaccuracies and see what they can reveal, or ask, all on their own. Maybe this would be a fruitful approach in the lab, too, here and there.
In a world of carefully curated microscopic images, of simple BioRendered bodies, the medium of paint is disruptive and fresh, messy, human. Flat images can only reveal so much, but even that is more than they are often granted in the practice of science. Walter Benjamin wrote: “For the first time, captions have become obligatory. And it is clear that they have an altogether different character than the title of a painting.”10 I want more works out of microscopy that are titled like paintings, that are paintings and take titles as such. I’m not arguing against normative scientific images, powerful and true as they often are, but rather arguing for encouraging plurality in our ways of seeing biology. To what ends? Unexpected scientific discoveries and artistic progress, yes; also biology as a source of fun and beauty and enjoyment and exploration.
Biologists used to draw more. They don’t have to anymore, but I want them to! And I want artists to look through microscopes, to muscle in on what is seen as the scientist’s domain and show us what they can.11 I want anyone to look at a neuron and draw what they see, or try to paint it, and to make plenty of mistakes.
You—scientist, artist, anyone—you pull up a cell and you try it sometime. You might find something surprising. You might just have fun.
If you have tried drawing or painting “scientific” subject matter of any kind, I’d love to hear about your experience and thoughts in the comments!
The dominant opposing theory at the time, advanced by Camillo Golgi and others, was that the brain was one big interconnected piece of tissue—not cells.
I’ve had mentors tell me to get a new image for a lab meeting if the original image looks something like the right-hand green neuron (the one with the big smudge in the frame, probably an autofluorescence nearby body cell). Of course, in some cases, unexpected fluorescence genuinely interferes with the signal and hinders interpretation. But even when that’s not the case, the presence of a non-target cell in an image is not a neutral fact but actively undesirable. Though it is a naturally-occurring part of an empirical observation, pre-determined expectations dictate that its appearance is not scientific. It doesn’t fit into the reality we want to curate. So, get another image, a clean one this time!
His drawings are heavily laden with interpretation; from his brain slices, he often picked out what he saw as important and didn’t represent the entire field. It’s better not to pretend that this isn’t what everyone (including scientists) is always doing to deal with the reality in front of them.
Berger (1962), The Basis of all Painting and Sculpture is Drawing.
Stay tuned for a future analysis of neuro/worm drawings from former colleagues’ lab notebooks, representational strategies and norms and process and all.
You could and probably should make this argument about human seeing too — plenty of 20th-century art worked to grapple with representing the world given the limitations of human visual perception, nothing new here!
To be clear, like many of the things I brought up in the painting section, this is not a question newly introduced by an artistic approach that scientists would never think of otherwise. It’s practically important, and scientists are smart and observant enough to ask — is the fluorophore actually expressing evenly through the cell? Do different cells express fluorophores to different extents? There are strategies to test this and try to make things as uniform as possible. What I think sets the artistic approach apart is that it gets to the question from a different starting point, and that it doesn’t necessarily respond by trying to create uniformity, but may (for instance, my first instinct) try to push fluorescence variation to the limits, and get the brightest and dimmest possible cells out of the same genetic construct. I see potential valuable scientific insights in this approach as well… plus it sounds beautiful and fun.
On the other hand, I doubt this is an interpretative direction a scientist would consider. Who knows where it leads? Maybe you should try to think it through.
Benjamin (1935), The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. (Intended for a very very different context which is however in my opinion highly relevant to everything I’m talking about here.)
Lots of artists work with microscopy/microscopic subjects (in photography and otherwise) and have produced lots of fruitful and interesting results! For an intro to bioart I recommend Eduardo Kac’s Signs of Life. With that said, I haven’t seen a lot of examples of artists painting microscopic subjects in the direction I’m proposing, so please share if you know of any. I also think Nikon’s Small World photo contest is a nice antidote to some of the scientific norms usually imposed on microscopic photos, although the works it elevates are still constrained by expectations of composition and clarity.
Really really great read Jess
Incredible