How Petri Palette started
Before I painted anything, I read the research on why students give up on science. It kept pointing to the same moment. Biology is easy to like while it is about hearts, frogs and weather. Then it moves inside the cell, into chromosomes and proteins nobody can see, and class turns into memorizing words.
The summer before my senior year, I spent six weeks in a cancer research lab at UAMS, studying melanoma and the part of the cell that folds new proteins. When I plan a painting now, I write down how it should feel: interphase is stringy and jumbled, prophase is loose and floaty, anaphase is bouncy, telophase is pinched. Then I write a title card short enough to read in a minute.