| I grew up in the wrinkled hills east of the San Francisco Bay. My home was flanked by freeways, but also girded about by live oaks, squirrels, and enough old cow bones to satisfy early fossil-hunting instincts. I later graduated from Williams College in Massachusetts, majoring in Geology while absorbing as much as possible from a variety of other fields, including literature, biology, math, physics, and inevitably, studio art. After a number of razzle-dazzle years working on problems of natural language analysis and information retrieval at a software start-up, I decided it was time for something completely different. In the spring of 2005, I completed the celebrated Science Illustration graduate program at the University of California, Santa Cruz. I will be rounding out my entree into the field with an internship at Scientific American. Why illustration? Why science illustration, in particular? There are few better ways to fully understand a subject than to illustrate it accurately, elegantly, and completely. More than just drawing pictures, good science illustration is a clear-eyed investigation of the world, often requiring intensive research on the topic at hand. And, with astonishing consistency, a truly accurate illustration is a pleasure to behold: as John Keats famously proclaimed, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I hope not to prove his stricture wrong. |
