My paintings belong to a genre called science art, or SciArt, that began with a drawing of cork in 1665. In this gallery I gathered the scientists and artists who paint cells, microbes and the molecules inside them, and wrote a title card for every piece.
Before cameras could be fitted to microscopes, a drawing was the only way to show anyone else what a cell looked like.
Robert Hooke's 1665 drawing of cork gave biology the word cell. Santiago Ramón y Cajal's drawings of nerve cells, made for work that shared the 1906 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, are still in use today.
David Goodsell holds a PhD in biochemistry, Greg Dunn a doctorate in neuroscience, and Hunter Cole a PhD in genetics. Each one turns what they know from the lab into art.
In a randomized study of fifth graders, science units taught with the arts built in led to better retention two months later for students reading below grade level.
The first pictures of cells were made by scientists who looked through a lens and drew what they saw. Their drawings taught the world what a cell looks like.
Hooke was apprenticed to a painter at 13 before he turned to science, and he drew the plates for his book himself. In a thin slice of cork he saw rows of tiny boxes that reminded him of the small rooms in a monastery, and he called them cells. The word stuck.
Public domain
Flemming drew dividing cells stage by stage, from chromosomes bunched in the middle to a cell pinching in two. In the same book he named the process mitosis, from the Greek word for thread.
Pairs with my Mitosis series.
CC BY 4.0, Wellcome Collection
Cajal, a Spanish physician and keen painter, stained brain tissue so single nerve cells turned black, then drew them. Purkinje neurons sit in the cerebellum, the part of the brain that coordinates movement. Cajal shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Camillo Golgi, the scientist the Golgi apparatus is named after.
Pairs with my Golgi Apparatus painting.
Public domain
Scientist painters today work from research data and lab images to show what no single microscope picture can: a whole cell, with every part in its place.
Goodsell, a biochemist at Scripps Research, paints part of a living cell magnified about a million times, with molecules placed from research data. Here an E. coli cell is cut open: the green wall, the yellow tangle of DNA, and reddish purple ribosomes that build proteins.
Pairs with my Protein Transcription series.
CC BY 4.0, RCSB Protein Data Bank
This painting shows an entire bacterial cell about 300 nanometers across, small enough that a thousand of them in a row would still be thinner than a credit card is thick.
CC BY 4.0, RCSB Protein Data Bank
An impression of a nearly mature zebrafish retina, its cells settled into three layers and colored by type. The painting was inspired by the multicolored fluorescent proteins researchers use to label different kinds of cells.
CC BY 4.0, Wellcome Collection
Some painters treat cells the way other artists treat landscapes and portraits, choosing them for their color, shape and drama.
Noel trained as a doctor and earned a PhD in basic science before she began painting cells on silk. Here a killer T cell, one of the immune system's defenders, destroys a cancer cell, cast as the knight and the dragon.
CC BY-NC 4.0, Wellcome Collection
Part of this painting is what a microscope shows and part is the artist's impression of blood cells and the structures around them.
CC BY-NC 4.0, Wellcome Collection
Neurons are the cells of the nervous system, and they carry information as electrical signals. This painting shows two of them reaching toward each other, the way nerve cells connect to pass a message along.
CC0, Wellcome Collection
Microbiologists paint too, with living microbes for paint and a petri dish of agar for a canvas. Ajay Kumar Chaurasiya grew this butterfly in 2021. Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin, made germ paintings on agar with colored bacteria, and since 2015 the American Society for Microbiology has run an Agar Art contest. Its 2024 contest drew a record 445 entries.
Sources: American Society for Microbiology, Agar Art contest results, 2024; Hektoen International, Sir Alexander Fleming, 2020.
Their work is protected by copyright, so I describe it here in words. Every one of them is worth looking up.
Epoxy paintings in petri dishes, San Francisco
Reis pours dyed epoxy into plastic petri dishes and hangs them by the dozen. The work began after she was diagnosed with Crohn's disease and a doctor let her watch her own cells react to different drugs under a microscope.
Watercolor cells and viruses, Washington, DC
Banks lets wet watercolor bleed into branching patterns that look like blood vessels and brain cells. She has said her best known paintings are her images of mitosis.
Neurons in ink and gold, Philadelphia
Dunn earned a doctorate in neuroscience and paints neurons in Japanese sumi-e ink, often on gold leaf. The style began by accident, when he blew on wet ink and it spread into shapes like nerve cells.
Drawings in glowing bacteria, North Carolina
Cole, a geneticist, paints with bioluminescent bacteria on petri dishes. The drawings glow blue-green and fade over about two weeks as the bacteria run out of food, so she photographs them while they last.
Glass sculptures of microbes, Bristol, England
Jerram, who is color-blind, designs clear glass sculptures of viruses and microbes with virologists. He leaves out color on purpose, to question the bright false colors in many pictures of microbes.
Paper sculptures of microbes, France
Brown cuts layered paper into microbes and cells by hand or by laser. His sculpture Outbreak (2014) took about four months to plan, cut and assemble, and he names Ernst Haeckel as an inspiration.
I'm Lily Butler, a high school senior, and Petri Palette is my small addition to this tradition. I paint the cell processes high school biology asks students to learn: the stages of mitosis and the path from gene to protein.
Each of my paintings hangs beside a title card that explains the science in plain language. My painting of the Golgi apparatus, shown here, pictures the organelle named for Camillo Golgi, who shared the 1906 Nobel Prize with Cajal.
The stages of mitosis and the path from gene to protein, each with a title card I wrote.