The Art of Science.

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Creativity runs deep in my veins, despite being a engineer and super fan of science. I've always love drawing and painting and art appreciation is just a part of my soul. It was a complete honor and surprise that B wanted to invite me and some of our friends to her totally exclusive Chelsea Arts Club for drinks and dinner. The Chelsea Arts Club was founded in the late 19th century as a haven for working artists. In order to be a member you had to be: 1. Bohemian in character and 2. Artsy! It was a hideout for famous people such as Salvador Dali and Francis Bacon and used as a place for artists to share their ideas and make connections. Although it has become much more difficult to become a member, B's parents have been for years and she was the youngest ever at the age of 17. As a matter of fact, she knows that her unusual name was decided right there in the club and the joke is that maybe she was even conceived there on the snooker table!

We arrived to a super unpretentious billiard room with overstuffed chairs and amazing guitars made out of everything imaginable on the wall. No phones or cameras are allowed in the entire place and there is a smashed phone framed in the entrance to remind you of such. It's labeled "Caught in the courtyard, behind the bushes." Inside there were people of ALL ages and ALL styles and we snagged a small table for our motley Belize Art Club of B, Me, Noa, Clarissa, Emma, and Tom. B and I lived in Belize; Noa meet me in Belize; Clarissa and Emma's families live in Belize; and Tom, well he met Noa in Honduras, but we invited him anyways. 😊 We started with the champagne and this older gentleman kept smiling and looking in my direction. I was quite confused until he came over and introduced himself as B's Dad! AWESOME! She hadn't seen him in months and it was a total coincidence that he and his wife were there!

Soon after we were led to our table inside where B pointed out the ginormous painting of inside the club from 40 years ago. Apparently everyone in the painting was an actual club member and they all got a bottle of whiskey for the portrait sitting. The artist needed an extra 'nose' on a person in the background and they used her Dad's so he got TWO bottles. She was so proud sharing this fact with us. 😊 Dinner was full of incredible food, service, and company. For a table of six persons who barely know each other, we really got on great.

Now, I said this is a working holiday, and I have been working, but it's not exactly exciting enough to blog about. As you know, or maybe not, I've started my own website design company and have been busy creating, building, and editing websites for a wide variety of clients. To me it's a perfect hybrid of science and art, technical jargon and creativity. Most freelance advice says I need to narrow down my services to a niche, but right now I am really happy doing a bit of everything. My clients have included dive shops, technical services, and artists to name a few. Throughout all these adventures I have been sneaking in time to work on my computer and faithfully planning events around my regularly scheduled conference calls. Because of the time difference, tonight's confernce calls happened to be at midnight and midnight thirty.

After our fab dinner, Clarissa had us on the list for a British Music Awards after party. Because of my work commitment, I watched my friends enter the exclusive party while I wondered the streets looking for free WiFi. I ended up outside a 24 hour Mc Donalds full of drunk and homeless people and conducted my two conference calls while shooing off people asking for cigarettes and change. I was bummed I missed the event but really proud of myself for getting the work done!

The next morning we awoke to a super cold and windy day. It was the perfect day for us to finally get to the Natural History Museum, always a favorite of mine. A museum this grandiose is another example of the marriage of science and art. The science has to be presented in a way that is aesthetically pleasing and simple enough for kids and non-scientific adults to understand. I was reminiscing about all the times my Mom and Dad brought me to museums, aquariums, and zoos. It was these interactions with the subjects that fueled my lifelong passion for animals, natural history, and the science of the Earth. How many times did they look at the dinosaur bones at the Milwaukee Public Museum with me? How many museum movies about the human body did they endure before I realized I wanted to be a Biomedical Engineer? How many workbooks did my Mom buy me, even though I completed all the pages in less than one hour? I wanted to buy everything in the museum store, especially the books. This time I actually had a bit of a mental breakdown because of desperately wanting to buy all the books and own their knowledge so badly. Many of them were scientific principles presented in illustrations through coloring books or detailed reference books. Science expressed through art.

Just like the ecosystem relies on every component being present and healthy, I think the same of subject knowledge. No topic is an island. Like us, each are important individually but even more essential as an interconnected system. I can barely think of a piece of art that didn't require the knowledge of something scientific for completion. And I certainly believe that everything we observe in science is as awe inspiring as a piece of art.

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Photos

An artist's representation of inside the club.
We improvised.

Belize Art Club in Chelsea
OK, this just makes me melt. Friends meeting friends. <3

My favorite dinosaur!
A work of art, indeed.