She's Got Art Down to a Science
by
Sarah Mitchell - 8/30/2006
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Julie Newdoll paints the seen and unseen, real and unreal, as one.
The Inuit Indians, probably known better to you as “Eskimos,” have an old song:
I think over again my small adventures; my fears,
Those small ones that seemed so big;
For all the vital things
I had to get and to reach,
And yet there is only one great thing,
The only thing:
To live to see the great day that dawns
And the light that fills the world.
Artist Julie Newdoll sees the world from a vantage point that is hard for many of us to conceptualize. Through her paintings, Julie has found a medium for marrying science and human mythology in a parallel and brilliant way that portrays the microscopic and macroscopic views of life together as one, showing just how unified life really is.
Through Julie’s Eyes
Julie was born in hot San Angelo, TX and moved shortly thereafter to a suburb just outside of Dallas called Garland. She feels lucky that around the age of 10 years old, her parents got smart and moved from Texas back to
California, from where they both originated. Julie’s 30-year and counting love for painting started when she was in high school and first tried her hand at oil painting. She also had a fascination with science, which led her to obtain her microbiology degree from the University of San Francisco. After that, she went straight into getting her medical illustration masters degree at USF. It was here that computer graphics caught her attention. Combined with the incredible research that was being conducted by the microscopic division, and molecular graphics, Julie saw the potential for art.
She took the microscopic imagery and composited it on a computer with a sketch. She then printed the image on canvas and painted over it. From that point on, Julie was enthralled by the possibilities of combining science and art.
Julie’s style has continued to grow and evolve over time and has even shown up at a much earlier age in her daughter Sophia…
Through a Child’s Eyes
“Mom, make sure it’s red!” says 5-year-old Sophia. “Red, right…” replies Julie as she heads off in search of the requested paint. Not only does Julie have a talent of her own, but she’s also passed it on to Sophia, who has become involved with Julie’s work in a most peculiar way.
Once upon a time, a client of Julie’s wanted a painting done relating to her breast cancer research. The client was very intrigued with the mythology and figures that Julie uses in her art and was wondering if there might be a way for Julie to combine breast cancer science and Inuit Indian mythology (the patron’s favorite culture).
“So I started looking into their culture and it’s very interesting,” says Julie. “They’re very big into shamans, or at least they were, and so here she is trying to heal in her own way and the shamans are healing in their own way. So I started making parallels between their sort of dreamy things that they do and the research that she does and came up with a set of two paintings she liked the concept for.”
Enter Sophia. “I tried to make a shaman and shaman’s can see through things
so you can see their bones. I get up early sometimes to work before the kids get up, so I was up and working and Sophia got up and ran in and said, ‘What are you doing?’ And I said, ‘Oh, I am trying to draw this person you can see inside, their bones and everything,’ and she said ‘Let me do it!’ And I said ‘Okay…’”
“Kids do everything in one stroke, they don’t make a mistake, they just do it,” says Julie. “Sophia’s drawing had all the intestines and bones and everything and a skullish face. I thought ‘Hey this is pretty good!’ and sent it to the client who said, ‘I love it! It’s very Inuit!’”
The early Inuits carved their art in bone or drew on sealskins. Since they used to live in snow houses, paintings on the wall were a bit out of the question. In the1960’s, the Inuits started to paint pictures. Their style was very childlike and primitive (making Sophia’s input quite accurate) with flat fields of color.
Julie now regularly consults Sophia for the Inuit artwork. “I’ll show her things having to do with whatever it is we’re talking about — bears, wolves, Inuits — and she’ll draw them. I will then use that to make my washes to show the client. I next paint it, but with a lot of her influence in it. I don’t know, I might have to let her sign it…” Julie laughs. But of course, Sophia’s work is not without its price. “She gets all of my money now anyway!” says Julie.
Sophia started painting when she was 1 or 2 years old and says she’s going to be an artist some day. She gave us a treat by painting an Inuit Indian real-time, using an Inuit Indian book for reference.
“She has this great technique where she uses charcoal and then she puts paint on top, smudging
the charcoal,” explains Julie, as she watches Sophia aggressively making little marks all around her drawing with the charcoal. “Oh! It’s raining today!” exclaims Julie. “No, it’s snowing,” Sophia calmly corrects her. “See that’s the thing with kids, you never know what’s going to happen; that’s what’s been so neat about each and every drawing that she’s done. No matter what I might be thinking it’s going to be, it’s never the same; it’s always something different with new elements in it that are quite inspirational and have taught me a lot,” says Julie.
Through the Eyes of Science
Sophia and Julie took us downstairs where at least 30 of Julie’s paintings line the walls of her house. Julie often creates series of five paintings at a time, such as her “Kimono” series.
“The Japanese tea ceremony involves using all of your senses so it was the perfect backdrop for the ‘Senses’ series. Each kimono represents the tissues from one of the senses and cells involved in receiving each sense. You’ve got these tendril-like things that receive smell and these little tendril-like things that also receive taste, they’re all related through evolution. What you use to see with also has a similar look – rods and cones are just cilia too. They may have all evolved from one sense or receiving thing – sort of re-using the technology,” says Julie.
Julie paints with oils but often finds herself doing a mixed media type of thing, using textures underneath the paint. Crushed stone and sand are an example of what she may use, as shown in her “Dine” (Navajo Indians) series of five paintings, which combine scientific thoughts on the origin of life with the Dine creation story.
“I mixed a bunch of sand in with the paint around the outside, and used dirt in the middle of each of the Dine paintings. I got the dirt from the Dine area several years ago when I was traveling around the desert,” says Julie. “I’ve had these bottles of dirt forever! My college roommate and I drove around the desert drinking iced tea
and we would see by the side of the road these incredible colors of dirt and I would shout, ‘Stop!’ And I’d get out my bottle and scoop up some dirt: red, purple, yellow. And in the Indian story they start in a red world, and then move on to a blue world, then to yellow. As they move from world to world it gets more sophisticated and they meet
more sophisticated beings and become more so themselves, so it’s very evolutionary orientated. Not only do they have rivers running through it and drying up and making this cell-dividing thing, they end up on an island in the end. Sort of like a cell with a nucleus.”
Julie is also in the middle of painting her taste-bud table top series. You can see more of these series at Julie’s website www.brushwithscience.com.
Through the Eyes of the Public
Julie is well known in her field. In fact there is a movement in scientifically inspired art, known as bio-art or sci-art, which is making her kind of work more popular. Her paintings have appeared on the cover of numerous
science magazines. Julie is also the Exhibits Director for YLEM. YLEM is a San Francisco based organization for artists
using science and technology (http://www.ylem.org/). At time of this writing Julie was deeply involved in the “Hitchhikers in the Valley of Heart’s Delight” project for the Inter Society for the Electronic Arts ZeroOne Global Festival of Art on the Edge at the San Jose Museum of Art. (This whole project has been thoroughly covered on the FAR website: Famous Hitch Hikers’ Safety Assured by Fine Art Registry™ Tags). It was through the Hitchhikers project that Julie first came into contact with the Fine Art Registry, as one of the artists involved, Jim Pallas, had found FAR and was enthusiastically tagging and registering his artwork.
From this Julie decided to tag and register her own work, which you can see in her FAR gallery, http://www.fineartregistry.com/cgi-bin/search.cgi?s=&p=&detail=2705. And Sophia will no doubt be very grateful for this, somewhere in the future, when provenance of her mother’s pieces needs to be established and their authenticity vouched for.
Julie’s own website, http://www.brushwithscience.com/, contains links to the Fine Art Registry website where
articles about her and her recent project can be found. Already Julie has a very large body of work and she has so
many projects going in so many directions that it’s hard to keep track. Registering her works with FAR, along with
transfer of ownership when she sells her pieces, will help bring order to her art and maintain a permanent record
for the future–a future that is positively bubbling over with different possibilities.
Through the Eyes of the Artist
“Once I started doing this it was like a never ending amount of subject matter that I just can’t stop,” says Julie. Her art is continually evolving as time goes by and will no doubt continue to shed light on the world from the small and large, real and mythical, as one.
And Sophia finished her latest Inuit painting. True to Julie’s statement about children being unpredictable, Sophia delivered. “My goodness, the whole thing turned red!”
And Through the Eyes of Another Artist
Julie sent us her favorite quote about art from the book
The Art Spirit by Robert Henri.
There are moments in our lives, there are moments in a day, when we seem to see beyond the usual– become clairvoyant. We reach then into reality. Such are the moments of our greatest happiness. Such are the moments of our greatest wisdom. It is in the nature of all people to have these experiences; but in our time and under the conditions of our lives, it is only a rare few who are able to continue in the experience and find expression for it.
At such times there is a song going on within us, a song to which we listen. It fills us with surprise. We marvel at it. We would continue to hear it. But few are capable of holding themselves in the state of listening to their own song. Intellectuality steps in and as the song within us is of the utmost sensitiveness, it retires in the presence of the cold, material intellect. It is aristocratic and will not associate itself with the commonplace—and we fall back and become our ordinary selves. Yet we live in the memory of these songs which in moments of intellectual inadvertence have been possible to us. They are the pinnacles of our experience and it is the desire to express these intimate sensations, this song from within, which motivates the masters of all art.
Robert Henri The Art Spirit
J.B. Lippincott Company, 1923
— Sarah Mitchell | August 30, 2006
About the Author: Sarah Mitchell is a freelance writer and photographer who has recently
begun working for the Fine Art Registry. Her science background made her particularly suited for this assignment. Her love of children was a help too!
Comments:
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This is a very beautiful article! The photos are stunning! A work of art about works of art.
Marc
September 11, 2006