if the powers that be just listened to me and made a mikhail tal movie..

#TeratologyChallenge day 3: Ectrodactyly

The prompt text is “mirror images of hands or feet” but ectrodactyly is technically loss of middle digits.  I’m going with the description instead of the real definition, because artificially inducing a mirrored hand was one of the coolest experiments in developmental biology!

If you think about it, embryonic development is an insane process.  This whole drawing challenge is about what happens when things go wrong, but think about how rare that is.  Why?  What is it that lets such complicated patterns form so reliably?  In the early days of developmental biology, people figured out that transplanting certain specific patches of cells could cause limbs or structures to form where they usually don’t.  Note, however, that this doesn’t distinguish between some kind of chemical signal and the possibility that the fate of each cell is predetermined somehow.

This experiment involved soaking a bead in a protein usually produced only on the back edge of a chick’s wing bud, and implanting it in the front edge.  This resulted in a perfect mirror of the last segment of the wing.  No cells are moved or harmed.  The protein in the bead changed the fate of the cells around it.  This proved that embryonic development is NOT hard-coded, but rather controlled by signal molecules the cells produce as they go.

The Claw: oil on canvas  122x 91cm

I have used an anamorphic portrait here in the “Landscapes of Betrayal” as a way of visually representing Winston Smith’s gradual realisation what Room 101 Holds in store for him… By moving from a central position in front of the artwork to the designated point of view at the left edge of the drawing, a confusion of half grasped visual information slowly morphs into a screaming face.

Landscape of Betrayal #7 graphite and watercolour

It has been pointed out that the anaglyph portrait might be seen to represent Big Brother himself, rather than, or as well as Winston Smith. Because of its distortion, the portrait observes the viewer BEFORE its discovery from the designated p.o.v.

Landscape of Betrayal #6 graphite and watercolour

Landscape of Betrayal #5 graphite and watercolour