Christmas Is All Around Us

I’m not really sure when my fascination with radial symmetry began. I do remember that, as early as four or five years old, I spent many an uncoordinated hour with my spirograph, attempting to make those ever-elusive perfect and delicate forms.

Several years later, I came across a box of engineer’s graphing paper in my grandfather’s house. The vellum paper was so finely lined that filling in the tiny boxes with a gel ink pen almost gave the effect of pointillism. Before long, with the aid of the (borrowed) graphing paper, I had begun to develop a method of drawing that I still use today, almost twenty years later. Over the years I have refined that method to look typically something like this:

Beginning with a single center dot I progress outward with the most precise geometric forms that my fine motor skills will allow. It’s a painstaking and meditative process, and one that I don’t often have the patience for lately.

These days, however, I’ve been spending a lot of time studying life and all the little bits and components that go into making living things work. I’m fascinated and inspired continuously by the images that crop up in my biology and chemistry texts.

Plant histology can really get my gears turning..

And I was bowled over when I first heard about (or saw about, rather) radiolarians, the delicate, glassy-shelled marine invertebrates also known as zooplankton.

Tonight I am inspired by the works of Ernst Haeckel, a German biologist/artist who made enormous scientific strides in his day, all the while appreciating and conveying the beauty of what he found in his intricate illustrations:

My efforts may not be so skillfully executed or breath-taking, but I’m content that I’ve been able to free up my rigid style a bit in order to infuse my typical radial dial “doodle” with a bit of life. To make it less of something you might find carefully drafted onto the miniscule lines of an engineer’s notebook, and more like something you might find looking back at you from under the lens of your microscope.