The mising link between science and art

by Chloe Shuff

I clearly remember being eight-years-old, and looking up at the frieze of pictures around the top of the classroom wall depicting the classifications of animals; I vividly see mammals, amphibians, reptiles, birds, insects and fish.

My imagination was sparked by the menagerie of curiosities at the Natural History Museum and the Jules Verne novels – which I inexhaustibly devoured – in which the main character was always a scientist, setting out on a geological expedition into the heart of a volcano or the surface of the moon.

The teacher chose that moment to ask me the perennial question: “So, what do you want to be when you grow up?” Without hesitation, my eight-year-old self gushed: “A writer and a scientist.” Just as quickly as I blurted out the answer, the teacher said automatically: “But which one?”

From fairly early on in our education we are taught that science and art are as distinct as night and day, and that crucial to the honing of our individual talents and aspirations, and ultimately our role in society, is the choice between ‘scientist’ and ‘artist’.

We know this distinction on a level unconscious to us, we knew it from our school reports and those parents evenings when a teacher had to decide what a pupil was good at, what party line to tow.

This would change from year to year for me. One teacher deciding to focus their praise on my interest in science, while the next year a different teacher preferred the arts and would only want to focus on my drawing or writing.

It seemed they were fighting two sides of an unspoken battle. What our education system repeatedly fails to grasp, or seems to have forgotten, is that science and art are not two opposing forces like the poles of a magnet, but more like two points on a continuum, elegantly blending into each other like colours in a spectrum.

Creative thought and imagination have always been essential to science, while the harmony of the natural world has always been a reservoir for artistic expression. Science and art are both forms of exploration. Throughout human history, science has inspired art and art inspired science, but it is only in very recent times that we seek to classify and specialise. Sometimes to our determent.

Both fields influence each other

Artists have learnt how to mix colours to different effect from a scientific understanding of hues. The images we see on our television screens, cinemas and computer monitors to the cyan, magenta, yellow and black system that we use for printing. Great expressions of film, word and art have been possible through the science of optical light.

Equally, much of science has been pre-imagined by science fiction. The term ‘robotics’ was first coined by author Isaac Asimov, and science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke dreamt up the concept of satellites. The Ancient Egyptians would not agree that the pyramid was only art.

It had a practical purpose and, given that, a technology was employed to achieve it. The marriage of art with science is what made the Renaissance a time of such prolific discovery and progress. Leonardo Da Vinci’s beautiful engineering and anatomy sketches, coupled with his intense scientific observation of the world made him the archetype of eclectic and open-minded Enlightenment thinking.

Much of what we know of biology and medicine comes from early anatomical artists whose attention to form and detail led us to a better understanding of the human body. In turn artists have learned how to create more accurate life drawing. Charles Darwin’s skilled zoological sketches – now on display in the Natural History Museum – allowed him the luxury of studying his specimens long after he departed a location, while they found ways to communicate the richness and underlying order of life.

Long-lost illustrations of the moon’s surface as seen through a telecope by Galileo have recently been discovered; beautiful watercolour reflections that are scientifically invaluable but artistic in their own right. By the 19th century, industrial revolution and the needs of the economy meant that art, design and engineering were becoming separate professional entities. Art and science are so distant from each other in the 21st century because we live in the age of specialisation, and our education system reflects this by necessity, with its pyramid structure of narrowing speciality.

Split in education

Although degrees in this country are split into Sc (science) and A (arts) distinctions, there is a strange ambiguity where the colours of the spectrum blur.

A Bachelor of Arts degree is mainly the domain of humanities and liberal arts, whereas a Bachelor of Science degree focuses on scientific subjects.

There is also a great field of education that falls into the zone of vocational, and many of these refuse to fit comfortably into the black and white mould of science or art.

Another example is the BEng or Bachelor of Engineering degree, given the distinction because it rests so stubbornly in the dead centre of both.

At some universities, subjects like Business Studies and Management can be learned through both BSc and BA degrees and there is some debate over exactly which type of degree is considered more valuable to employers.

Very often the names of degrees are more historic than being descriptive of their content. There are also various careers that could combine both art and science or practical chemistry, such as art conservation, glass and jewellery making, or even textile design and photography. Although combined degrees are common, they very rarely encompass both art and science.

All this forces the question: does the modern fixation with pigeon-holing our education system into neat categories force limits on our knowledge and creativity?

The internet's affect

Today, signs are beginning to emerge that science is receiving a popular revival amongst the casually curious. The rise of popular science and the huge impact of the internet on people’s ability to access a wealth of information on virtually any topic means that those without any prior scientific training, including ‘creative types’, can become pseudo-scientists or at least science enthusiasts without any academic training.

In a recent article on The Guardian website, physicist Brian Cox, known as the face of particle physics on television, proudly claims that science has become the new rock‘n‘roll: “The incredible ambition of the Large Hadron Collider has fired our imagination; physicists have become cult TV stars; dramatic new pictures from space grace a million computer screensavers,” he says.

But there is a certain irony to all this. In the age of constant and sometimes superfluous information, it is far too easy for a casual interest to be watered down by anecdote, and for the real science behind the drama to be misunderstood.

People no longer want an in-depth understanding and the amount of time we are prepared to spend on actually studying the facts is testament to our short attention spans and our insatiable appetite for novelty. If science is so ‘cool’, as one commenter deftly pointed out, why is it that The Guardian stopped printing their Science supplement?

Frequent London Underground users will probably have noticed the public art project ‘Poems on the Underground’, which celebrates the 350th anniversary of the Royal Society, with poems spanning the last three centuries of science.

Londoners are lucky to live in a city where science and art are celebrated culturally and as equal areas of human endeavour, and the Science Museum is a great example. The museum’s website invites scientific artists or artistic scientists to “come and discover how the once opposing worlds of art and science have finally been united in a spell-binding blend of inspiration and innovation,” with its Who Am I gallery.

The exhibit, which explores the challenging area of biomedical science, features the work of seven artists who have engaged with universal narratives on the theme of human identity, language, consciousness, genetics, sexuality, brain science and the mapping of the human genome.

Materials used range from paint and ink to cast iron and multimedia, and the specially commissioned pieces will open up the possibility of dialogue between artists and scientists. The Science Museum re-opens its gallery this June and is free to attend.