Why I picked "Art...On a Microscopic Scale" as the Title of this Blog

Histology is the study of the tissues that make up organisms and the cells that make up those tissues. Since we rely heavily on vision as humans, this means Histology involves a lot of visual data. 

• Cross sections of tissue mounted on slides
• 3D reconstructions of various structures
• 3D intact structures that have been made transparent to an extent and per-fused with a particular marker
• Images of tissues

The reason I am most looking forward to this class, is simply the beauty and artistry that I will get to see. Yes, the information I will learn is interesting and I am eager to learn it. But there is a quality to histology that is even more attractive to me - art. The beauty with which each structure is created is unique and similar to many styles of art. 

Renal Medulla - 1

Its a long jump, but the pattern I see here in the renal medulla reminds me of things like Van Gogh's Starry Night over the Rhone, Aboriginal Dreamtime art, and the painting style of Monet. An organic, abstract pattern of various sizes of dots. 

Camille Monet and a Child in the Artist' Garden in Argenteuil - 4

Starry Night over the Rhone - 5

Dreamtime Sisters - 6

Another Reason I appreciate Histology as a type of art - is because the slides themselves have qualities that, if described with terms typically applied to art, make them a type of art. One of my favorite TV shows is NCIS.  A character on the show (Abbey) has decorated her office with images taken with different lab techniques. The images themselves are visual data that she had used to solve cases in the past, but they are also beautiful in their own right. Similarly - slides of tissue can be as well.

Central Vein of Liver - 2

The white space (the cavity within the central vein) has abstract lines  radiating out of it, like a sun or the petals of a flower. The deeper purple of the nuclei add another level of design to the image. the image is busy, but the blank space in the middle allows the eye to rest - this could be a good focal piece. 

Brain (Cerebellum) - 3

This is a beautiful design you might incorporate into a choral reef themed room, hang on the wall, design a modern coat hanger based off of. The design is in different shades of the same color. If this were a painting, I would say the darker purple was used to create an outline of the design of he lighter purple. Or maybe the dark purple creates a design of the interlocking and overlapping leaves of a tropical rain forest. The white spaces would be the light shining through the leaves. 

The body is a complex thing of machinery, a powerful computer, an organism. These are all ideas that have been used to describe the body in the past and influence the way we think about the body. Whether it be human, mamal, reptile, or mullusc. I would like to present another lense through which to view cells, tissues, organs, and organisms as a whole. As beautiful pieces of art. Because they are complex and beautiful, no one can deny that. 

References: 

1. http://www.siumed.edu/~dking2/crr/RN021b.htm
2. https://embryology.med.unsw.edu.au/embryology/index.php?title=File:Liver_histology_101.jpg
3. http://www.sporcle.com/games/sbme/histology-slideshow
4. http://www.wikiart.org/en/claude-monet/madame-monet-and-child
5. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Starry_Night
6. http://www.aboriginalartstore.com.au/artists/colleen-wallace-nungari/dreamtime-sisters-191/