The prompt for this is any topic. Any help critiquing and evaluating this essay would be greatly appreciated: general comments to grammar issues.
Thank you so much!
There is a deer skull perched, amid the stuffed animals and textbooks, on a shelf above my desk. I did not drag home road-kill or murder Bambi's mother. Instead, my brother found the skull hanging from a tree branch, already bleached, when wandering in upstate New York. He brought it home, bleached it again (just to be safe) and entrusted it to me when he left for college.
My mom always walks into my room and exclaims, "Amanda! Put that thing in the closet. Or better yet, in the trash!" But like the shirts that will never be arranged by color or the books by height, the skull remains as is. I assure my mother that despite her fears I will never redecorate my room in black or listen to music that she considers "horrendous screaming". There will be no tattoos or piercings making a sudden appearance. The skull does not a signal a desire to enter the Gothic subculture; instead it serves as inspiration.
Perhaps it is morbid but there is nothing more fascinating to draw than skeletons. I do not create artwork involving bones to make a statement on human mortality but to revel in the beauty of the skeleton. Human flesh has long been a subject of art, from idealized sculptures in Ancient Greek to modern representations of the body. The outer form is beautiful and equally so is its inner structure.
Follow the lines of the deer's frontal bone, sleek as a race car. Run your fingers across the teeth, like eroded cliffs of the Grand Canyon. Gaze at the translucent septum, paper-thin like a moth's wing. Trace the weaving lines where different bones of the skull have stitched themselves together. This is what I love about my deer skull and what I love about biology, the beauty of it.
The more I know about how organisms are structured and function, from the cellular to organismal level, the more I see the aesthetic beauty of them. However, beyond anatomy and physiology, other aspects of biology are also connected to art. Simply study the synchronized movements of a flock of geese, the growth of a fern, or the evolutionary path of a whale and it is easy to appreciate nature not only scientifically but artistically.
I cannot sketch models, drawing the slope of the spine or shading in the shadows of the collarbone without thinking of the vessels and veins branching beneath the skin. I watch as a model shifts to settle into a more comfortable pose and imagine the muscles contracting and flexing.
Science and art are intrinsically tied in my head. My passion for one fuels my appreciation for the other. And so, on days where I'm exasperated and tired, desperately thinking of a concept sketch or cramming in the last bits of knowledge before a science test, I look up at the deer skull on my shelf and remember what it is I love about each subject.
