Art, Design, and Biology

Introduction – Why not stay in our lane?

We were driving to the beach for a family vacation the first time I remember being consciously aware of the importance (and later my fascination) of using disciplines outside of my own for inspiration and to diversify my artistic process.  Even though I had always, on a much more casual level, used inspiration outside of my art forms for this purpose, this was the first time that I found myself purposely and intentionally using a discipline or ideas outside of the arts as a conscious technique for making art.  Of course this was the pre-smartphone era, so I had picked up a National Geographic magazine to pass the time and found myself reading an article on Charles Darwin and his practice of drawing barnacles as part of his documentation and to show their spontaneous variation, disequilibrium, and seemingly endless diversification.¹  At the time, I was primarily looking for inspiration to help me get over the writer’s block that I was having while trying to come up with new song material.  I was struck and fascinated about learning more about the crossover between Darwin’s scientific reasoning for creating his drawings and the actual intricate (and sometimes crudely actualized) beauty of the artwork.  It was this crossover that sparked my initial intention to write a song about Darwin’s process and his emphasis on barnacles in particular. 

The collaboration between different art disciplines is nothing new.  Whether it is Picasso’s friendship with Stravinsky, Kandinsky’s with Schoenberg, or even more recently, the collaboration between Damon Albarn and visual artist Jamie Hewlett to create Gorillaz.  But what happens when we look into the artistic history of Romare Bearden, who was a practicing musician but also an accomplished athlete who almost played major league baseball or even our local Pittsburgh artist Baron Batch who worked professionally as an athlete with the NFL before leaning more into visual art when injuries derailed his American football career.  And you might say that athletes, being part of a performative profession that have discipline and practice techniques, etc.., are just another form of artist.  Honestly, I would probably agree with you, but what if we took things a step further and made the connections to research based disciplines that would be further outside of any ‘performative’ related fields? 

So if we are able to connect the arts to each other, how do the arts connect to subjects and disciplines not commonly associated with the arts?  How do these subjects and disciplines use the arts as a tool?  In our case, how can visual art be used as a scientific or biological tool and how can biology and science be used as an artistic tool?  Is there a way to make these different entities symbiotic to each other?  How does human error factor into scientific and artistic discovery?  Like Albrecht Dürer’s rhinoceros or even Darwin’s barnacles, what can get lost in translation?

Since the very beginning of my lifelong journey with the arts, I have found both artistic inspiration and academic support when looking at any project through the lenses of different disciplines.  Some more famous examples would be Schoenberg and his mathematical application music making through his twelve-tone method,² the biological or even mathematical lens of portraiture and still life drawing, comparing the music sampling techniques of the past few decades to the collage works of artists like Romare Bearden, or even going to the Pythagorean tuning system (which is the basis for tuning in most music since the fifteenth century)³, we can find cross pollination across an endless example of disciplines from both inside and outside of the performing and visual arts.  His rhinoceros aside, Albrecht Dürer was, even in the sixteenth century, studying and pursuing a more scientific and methodical way of approaching figure drawing using sets of fixed ratios to bring a more realistic and accurate element to his work along with using it as a teaching technique.⁴

As an educator as well as a working visual artist and musician, I use a great deal of different techniques to spark new ideas or, as stated before, use as inspiration when creating my own work or when facilitating the creative process of others.  A songwriter would get rather bored if they were only writing songs about the art of writing songs.  As well, a visual artist would probably also get rather bored if given the task of only being able to be making art that represents only the visual side of their work.  Although we can find plenty of great visual art and music that references nothing outside of their discipline, it might get redundant and repetitive very quickly if that was the only reason or inspiration to make something or an artist’s only reason to participate in the act of creation.  In addition, how well would artists and musicians find common ground and be able to relate with, or creatively speak to, humans that are outside of their discipline?

As an educator, it is not only of the utmost importance to give my students tools to learn and remember what they learned, but also for them to learn and remember on the deepest levels that I can provide.  When our brains can connect our knowledge to something else, it makes the knowledge and tasks easier and more meaningful, along with making it easier for my students to retain the knowledge.⁵  The reasons for creating a cross curricular approach for pedagogical means bears a resemblance to many of the same reasons that I often use these approaches for inspiration while making my personal art. 

In addition, as an adult learner who struggles with concerns about attention issues, I have had to look for new and innovative ways to maximize my own concentration and ability to retain information.  How can we, as teachers, reach the disenfranchised or just plain bored students?  How can we excite them again?⁶  I am constantly coming back to finding new ways to find the connection between varying subjects and disciplines.  Whether it is using routines and exercises, or finding connections outside my chosen disciplines, these connections definitely help my focus and retention.  These approaches have also had a huge and positive impact on my evolution as an artist, creator, and educator. 

As far as the classroom goes, cross curricular learning and cross referencing learning has not only been a useful tool, but also a fun way to start so many of our school-based project and unit conversations.  I have found that pulling from the vast and diverse backgrounds and experiences of my students has given me a more complex web of knowledge.  It has, as well, given me the ‘good problem’ of having vast examples to choose from and given me more tools in my toolbox than I might need.  The goal is to pass at least some of these techniques (and even my enthusiasm for them) along to my students.

As with anything, integrating other subjects is something that might not come naturally or enthusiastically but can be a useful tool for pretty much all students, artists, and educators.  However, whether cross curricular integration comes naturally or not, it is something that needs to be delivered with intentionality and requires constant reflection and adjustment to stay relevant and to stay fresh.  If I am intentional, enthusiastic, and authentic, I can see in student response and feedback, that very intentionality, enthusiasm, and authenticity reflected right back at me.⁷

“It’s not as if one can shift music, visual art, dance, or spoken word like pieces in a Tetris game until each art form plops into its perfect place, but it does give one the idea that some juggling of contexts might not hurt either.”⁸

-David Byrne – How Music Works