I wanted to do a painting about DNA and so I did. But what I didn’t understand at the time was that those cool looking bars that connect the two sides of the DNA strand are called base pairs and that there are four specific types of nucleotide pairing. What that means is if you are going to accurately represent DNA you can only use four colors within those “bars” and that two of the colors would always pair up.
You can click here: http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/B/BasePairing.html for a more detailed explanation of base pairing.
A with T: the purine adenine (A) always pairs with the pyrimidine thymine (T) C with G: the pyrimidine cytosine (C) always pairs with the purine guanine (G)
So when I first painted the canvas, I had a rainbow of colors in those connecting bars and WAY more colors than I should. There so only be four colors total.
Some very kind biologists and chemists came to me and explained where I had made a mistake and so I corrected it and that correction made this painting much more accurate and in my opinion, better.
That lesson inspired me to reach out to more scientists when making art, because the truth of what we know and the current understanding we have of the natural world is often much more wonderful and beautiful than that which we can imagine on our own.
I hope you agree and I hope you will consider becoming my patron for a little as $1 by clicking here: https://www.patreon.com/SurlyAmy or sharing this project with others so I can continue to merge my love of art with my love of science!
Here is my DNA painting!
