Artist38: Ernst Haeckel

I'm breaking the rules a bit with Ernst Haeckel. He only lived for the earlier part of the 20th century, but his art and style are very influential in a lot of today's art, science, and thought. I think looking at his work will be important in my own work as well. Specializing in many fields - art, biology, philosophy, medicine - his art was informed by the both close, analytical observations of a scientist and the keen aesthetic sense of a visual artist.

His drawings and paintings, used for journals and textbooks of the day and for decades following, are beautifully composed. Like James Prosek, he keeps true to the anatomy of what he's portraying, while keeping aesthetics in mind in how they are placed and displayed. It's clear that symmetry and the spacing are heavily considered in his images. He understood the importance of what he was showing and (perhaps, more relevant to our purposes in an art course) realized how important careful, deliberate use of composition and design is in communicating and representing something visually. Despite the more objective, no-frills nature of scientific thought, he realized that as thinking, feeling beings, how something is communicated, not just what is communicated, is important to consider.


Here's a blog with a bunch of his art if you want to see more.