seeing my brain

Until a few months ago, I had never tried to draw the brain, and in fact most of my figurative drawings rarely even include the face or the head.  when we look at images of people, we tend to look to their faces to provide the expressiveness, and i wanted people to focus on the body instead. and when it came to the brain, the gap just seemed too wide between what it looks like and what it really is.  I hadn't been inspired by its imagery the way i instantly was when i first saw a human skeleton, or the intricate interweavings of tendons and muscles, or the branching webs of blood vessels or neural networks.  at the same time i've been fascinated and deeply interested in consciousness and the workings of the brain.  and then in early April, i received an email, with an image attachment, that immediately changed my mind.

the email was from Dr. Caitlin Hardy, a physician doing radiology research with cutting-edge 7-Tesla MRI technology at the Center for Biomedical Imaging (part of the NYU Medical Center/School of Medicine).  she wrote that she had been “struck by the beauty of the living body and the brain when viewed at such high resolution.” she had been inspired to develop an art exhibition that would pair these MRI images with artists' interpretations of them, and she invited me to be part of the project.  If i wanted to, I would get to have my own brain scanned – another chapter in my ongoing artistic investigation of my own body.

there's a lot more to the story of how i got from there to here, but on September 13th i had the MRI, and now i have pictures of my own brain!  I've already started to work with them and create new 'drawings' and i'm experimenting with combining them with my floating colors imagery, to suggest states of consciousness or mental dreamscapes.

i'll post some of the new pieces soon - and let you know once the exhibition has been scheduled (probably in 2011, in a gallery in NYC).  meanwhile, here are two of the 'slice' images from the MRI scan - amazing!