Vashon Island -May 2024
"Every science touches art at some points—every art has its scientific side." -Armand Trousseau
TAPESTRY - Photomicrograph of crystalline acetaminophen found in Tylenol®.
A FUNDRAISING SUCCESS:
Thank you to all who purchased framed crystal photographs for my 2024 Fine Art Expo charity fundraiser. With your generosity, we raised $1200 to donate to FOTOKIDS, a group I had the pleasure to first work with during a photo/mentoring workshop in Guatemala several years ago.
Fotokids was founded by award-winning, former Reuters news service photographer Nancy McGirr in 1991. Since its inception the program has provided services to more than a thousand children, reaching more than 500 families living in poverty. Fotokids’ work has been exhibited in leading galleries and museums in 14 countries worldwide.
You can learn more about the terrific work that they do at fotokidsoriginal.org.
"Science and art belong to the whole world, and the barriers of nationality vanish before them. -Johann Wolfgang van Goethe
ART AND SCIENCE: THE TRUE TALE OF PETER RABBIT
Life has a habit of throwing us curve balls. Also knuckle balls and high-inside fastballs that can knock us down and sometimes knock us out. Scientists and artists get knocked down a lot. It's simply what happens when pursuing the creative call. Those who succeed pick themselves up, dust themselves off and take a hard look at how they can modify their approach. Then they get back to work.
The life story of the mycologist (one who studies fungi), Beatrix Potter, beautifully illustrates this point. Potter, of course, is much better known for her "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" and other wildly successful children's books she began self-publishing in 1902.
Born in 1866, Beatrix Potter was home-educated and showed an early talent for observing and illustrating the natural world. She began her study of the fungi while on holidays in the Lake District of northern England, creating an extensive portfolio of stunning watercolor paintings. At the time, little was known about fungi, and Potter began studying the germination of the fungal spores under the microscope, then illustrating and documenting what she discovered. She assembled her discoveries into a scientific paper titled "On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae."
The Victorian Age was a time when women were expressly forbidden from pursuing formal scientific education or joining scientific societies where the discoveries of the day were shared, discussed, and published. Not only was membership reserved for men, the research libraries and meetings were also off-limits to women.
With the help of a male colleague her paper was presented to the London Linnaean Society but quickly rejected by the disturbingly misogynistic gatekeeper of the group, William Turner Thiselton-Dyer who called her work "unimportant" and dismissed her drawings without bothering to look at them.
Potter, who does not seem to have been particularly disturbed by the snub, instead focused her immense creative and entrepreneurial talents on self-publishing "The Tale of Peter Rabbit." Published in 1902, it quickly sold out before a second edition could even be printed. She went on to publish more than 60 stories and was the first person to patent and license a stuffed toy representing a fictional character, Peter Rabbit. Her books have sold over 250 million copies, and her brand is estimated to be worth 500 million dollars today. Her fungi illustrations are studied for their scientific accuracy and used by mycologists worldwide to help identify mushroom species.
When confronted with adversity and the limitations imposed on her by the social dogmas of her era, Beatrix Potter's creative resilience is a lesson well worth remembering the next time life throws us a curveball.
Illustration from "The Tale of Peter Rabbit" -Beatrix Potter
