A few images from the "Our Small Rooms" exhibit at the Cafritz Arts Center, featuring my work and Kendall Nordin's. More about the show here and here.
Thursday, March 15, 2012
Some Images from Our Small Rooms
A few images from the "Our Small Rooms" exhibit at the Cafritz Arts Center, featuring my work and Kendall Nordin's. More about the show here and here.
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
Best Rejection Letter Ever
Hey, I'm an artist. I apply for a lot of stuff, and I get rejected a lot. I don't like getting rejected, and sometimes it makes me cry, but it's part of the game. That said, if you have to tell people their entries were not chosen for something, there are good and bad ways to do it. We've all seen examples of what not to do, but today I received a great example of a kind, supportive and personal rejection. This letter *actually made me feel good*, so I am reprinting an excerpt here:
Dear Michele
Many thanks for taking part again in our Cover Contest. We had another great time here at [redacted], looking through more than 1,500 submitted images. The quality of the submissions was as high as ever, and the jury had the wonderfully difficult duty of pre-screening and evaluating all submissions. Only the 500 most promising pictures were included in the final round of scoring, which means that many good-quality submissions could not be considered in full detail.
I am glad to let you know that the jury decided to include all of your submissions in the final round:
“Blue Mitosis” (m-m-banks-33445.tif) reached place 102 in the non-scientific section of the contest (a perfect 10 in my book); “Petri Dishes 1” (m-m-banks-23765.tif) reached place 134 in the non-scientific part of the contest; “Blue and Green Petri Dishes” (m-m-banks44662.tif) was ranked 174th (another one of my personal favourites, actually).
Congratulations!
Like in previous years, the jury and the editors will also select a small number of images for future covers of [redacted]. Would you like us to keep your pictures under consideration for this selection, or would you rather have us delete the corresponding files from our records?
Thank you very much again for participating in our little contest. We hope that you enjoyed it as much as we did.
Kind regards and best wishes
[Really nice guy]
Now everybody else do this.
Thursday, January 12, 2012
Our Small Rooms at the Cafritz Arts Center
A little more about the Montgomery College Show, which opens today. (Essential info is here) Don't forget, the reception is Thursday, February 9, from 6-8 pm.
This exhibit is part of a year-long series that Montgomery College is sponsoring called "Intersections: Where Art Meets Science"
Some background about the artists - we're both based in DC. I mainly work in watercolor and collage, and most of my work over the last few years has been focused on scientific themes. I was recently featured on the Scientific American arts blog, Symbiartic, talking, among other things, about how I got started painting scientific subjects.
One of the paintings in this show, From the Cells to the Stars, was created in response to a friend's death and Carl Sagan's idea that humans are made of "star stuff". I blogged about it here and it was featured on Brainpickings. This show will be the first time the painting is exhibited in public.
I also feature paintings of bacteria and viruses (those are viruses above). Although we normally consider these to be invaders, viruses and bacteria are a huge part of our bodies playing vital functions in everything from digestion to cognition.
Another piece, Portrait of a Human, is a series of 16 panels, each with a specific cell type, from retinal cells to bone marrow to neurons. This is a brand-new piece created specifically for this exhibit.
Kendall Nordin is a multi-disciplinary artist. For the past decade her practice has focused on visual art, performance, and music. Her visual work has been exhibited in the US, Australia, and Estonia and is included in the viewing program of The Drawing Center, NYC. In the past year, exhibition venues for her work include the Container Space Gallery, Low Lives Festival, the DC Convention Center, Pulse Art Fair in Miami, Porch Projects, Gallaudet University, and the (e)merge Art Fair.
Nordin's video piece, Artists Throwing Rocks (see it here: http://vimeo.com/nordin) was selected for the (e)merge Art Fair in 2011. Her work for this exhibit consists of a site-specific installation on the theme of the cell.
Tuesday, January 10, 2012
Cell Art Show at Montgomery College
I'm in this two-artist show with Kendall Nordin at the Cafritz Arts Center at Montgomery College from January 12-March 9, 2012. Reception is on February 9 from 6-8 pm - please come!
Our Small Rooms
Michele Banks and Kendall Nordin
Opening Reception: Thursday, February 9, 6–8 p.m.
Morris and Gwendolyn Cafritz Foundation Arts Center located
at 930 King Street on the west side of the Takoma Park/Silver
Spring Campus. Parking is available in the West Garage, located
immediately behind the center. For maps and directions, visit
www.montgomerycollege.edu/maps.
www.montgomerycollege.edu/arts-tpss/exhibitions
Wednesday, October 19, 2011
From the Cells to the stars
I usually don’t explain my paintings too much. Most of them don’t really need it (“these are dividing cells”) and anyway, I want people to experience my work however they want. But the painting I made yesterday is a little different. I want to tell its story in words.
My friend Cathy died this August. In 2005, Cathy was diagnosed with lymphoma, for which she underwent a year of grueling treatment. After her doctors told her that the disease was in remission, she threw a big party for all the friends – and there were many - who had supported her through the ordeal. Then she pretty much went back to life as usual, raising her two kids and being active in local politics.
Then, in 2010, Cathy started noticing worrying symptoms and feared a relapse. But this time it wasn’t lymphoma, it was MDS - myelodysplastic syndrome triggered by her previous chemotherapy. MDS is a disorder of the stem cells in the bone marrow which causes a decline in the body’s ability to produce blood. To vastly oversimplify, patients with MDS can be kept alive for a while by constant infusions of blood products, but the only cure is a bone marrow transplant. So Cathy had one, with bone marrow from one of her brothers. It didn’t take. She was undergoing high-dose chemo to prepare for a second transplant when she contracted an infection and died.
I wanted to paint something, but not a “cancer painting”. Cathy was a fan of my work and had one of my pieces hanging in her home. But when I showed her the painting of cancer cells I had done for my NIH show, she said, “I don’t know why anyone would want a picture of cancer!” I could see her point. But my work focuses on the cells – the cells that carry us around, that let us live and breathe and think – and that sometimes go bad and let us down.
I was reading about astronomer Carl Sagan, who often expressed the idea that humans are made of “star stuff”. That is, that all the basic elements of life on earth derive from “space debris” from the gigantic explosions of massive, ancient stars. This concept is at once so simple and so mind-boggling that it’s a struggle to absorb, much less to express artistically. I started looking around for ideas of how to visually portray the basic elements such as hydrogen, helium and nitrogen. Um. This is difficult, because you can’t see them. If you do a Google image search on Carbon, it comes up with a lot of gray-black cars. But when I thought about how the elements were released, I found supernovas. Not only are supernovas beautiful and awe-inspiring, they bear a strong resemblance to dividing cells, especially explosively dividing cancer cells.
Here’s the other thing. Carl Sagan also had MDS. He underwent three bone marrow transplants before he died in 1996. So this painting, besides celebrating the cosmic connection that all living creatures share, goes out to Cathy and Carl. From the infinitely tiny cells deep in the marrow of their bones, to the billions of stars in the sky.
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
Upcoming Events
Hey, want to see me and my artwork IRL? If you're in the DC area, you're in luck. I'll be peddling my wares at a bunch of festivals this spring and summer. I don't usually bring too many science paintings to these, though, so if you want to see something in particular, please drop me an email ahead of time to miche (at) null.net so I'll make sure to bring it.
Spring - Summer 2011
March 27- April 16
Very Cherry AdMo Pop-up Shop
April 2
Big Cherry,
April 17
WIS Spring Bazaar, DC
May 7
May 21
DC Craft Mafia's Spring Thing
May 29
SoWeBo Festival, Baltimore
June 11
Ballston Market, VA
ballstonarts-craftsmarket.blogspot.com
June 18-19
July 15-17
Artscape, Baltimore
www.artscape.org
July 31
Big Cherry, Take 2 - Silver Spring, MD
August 13
Monday, April 4, 2011
Spare One Drop for Dreaming
One of the things I struggle with when I paint scientific pictures is how to straddle the line between illustration and imaginative art. I want to create something recognizable, but not something appropriate for a textbook. When I'm planning a picture, I'm generally focused on how to create a beautiful and meaningful image. But when I get down to the actual painting, I sometimes get more wrapped up in how to make something look like it has a glistening curve, or when to drop in the second color so it blooms just so. So oftentimes I end up with something that is closer in letter than in spirit to my original intent. Today was a nice exception.
I decided to work on some heart and blood-themed pieces. I'm not sure why, but some lines of a a fairly obscure poem kept going through my head the whole time I was painting. Here it is:
Winter Remembered
Two evils, monstrous either one apart,
Possessed me, and were long and loath at going:
A cry of Absence, Absence, in the heart,
And in the wood the furious winter blowing.
Think not, when fire was bright upon my bricks,
And past the tight boards hardly a wind could enter,
I glowed like them, the simple burning sticks,
Far from my cause, my proper heat and center.
Better to walk forth in the frozen air
And wash my wound in the snows; that would be healing;
Because my heart would throb less painful there,
Being caked with cold, and past the smart of feeling.
And where I walked, the murderous winter blast
Would have this body bowed, these eyeballs streaming,
And though I think this heart’s blood froze not fast
It ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming.
Dear love, these fingers that had known your touch,
And tied our separate forces first together,
Were ten poor idiot fingers not worth much,
Ten frozen parsnips hanging in the weather.
The lines "and though I think this heart's blood froze not fast/It ran too small to spare one drop for dreaming" swirled around and around in my head, and they helped me paint. I let myself relax about the technical details and focus on the flow, the dreaming. And a beautiful painting emerged.
It may be a stretch to link a poem about a man trying to forget his love while they are separated to a painting of cells and blood vessels. But it worked for me today. Because I let my heart's blood flow, and spared a drop for dreaming.
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