Week 3 - Artists OTW - Alexander Fleming & Jerri Bartholomew

     Alexander Fleming is microbiologists working during the early 1900s and is most known as the scientists who dicovered penicillin. Not only did he discover one of the most important antibiotics we use to date, he was also one of the first scientists to use microbes for art. He painted people, objects, houses, and actions on a petri dish using bacteria. His artwork below is a person, two people fighting, and a mother feeding her baby. I think petri dish art is especially difficult to do because unlike regular paint,  bacteria cultures are usually clear with a slight yellowish tinge to it.This makes it really difficult to see what is being drawn. You would basically have to draw blind and then grow it and see what happens. The only indication you have that tells the artist that they may be doing something right is the marks on the agar from the inoculating brush. Clearly he kept it up and got a lot better, which I think is very impresive.

Jerri Bartholomew is another microbiologist that creates glass art inspired by her research or some microbes that may be important today (Covid). The art that I showed below is her glass art of the structure of SARS-Cov-2 surface proteins. To make this, she used a score that translated the proteins into music, then she put it on a silkscreen, printed it on glass, then fused and casted it to make her art. Jerri's art is more interesting to me because most microbiology art you see is just bacteria drawn on petri dishes. This is the first art that I've seen that doesn't include a petri dish. 

I think between these two artists, they only thing they really have in common is that they're both microbiologists. Jerri makes art of microbes but not with them, while Fleming makes art with microbes. They also draw different things, Jerri focuses primarily on microbes, but Fleming draws people and scenes.