Graham Johnson Biographic Page

   FiVth member, Graham Johnson, spent his childhood exploring the local marshlands and estuaries of his native Joppa, Maryland.  Graham's creative and keenly observant father and his environmentally conscious, well-read mother instilled Graham with a respect for the processes of nature and an insatiable curiosity about the universe…biology in particular.  From canoeing the brackish waters on weekends with his parents to public-school shoreline hikes, the local backdrop strongly influenced Graham's recreation, education, and developing philosophies.  Beauty beheld at the water's edge undoubtedly catalyzed his lifelong interest in art and nature.
   In 1991, Graham entered St. Mary's College of Maryland on the southern waters of the Chesapeake Bay where he basked in a true liberal arts education, sampling courses from sociology to physics, economics to Spanish, and even a couple classes in sailing. After a sophomore bout of career indecision, he returned to his first loves of nature and art and resolved to design his own curriculum. St. Mary's allowed him the flexibility to create a course of study combining fine arts and hard sciences that would prepare him for graduate training in medical illustration. Fulfilling his art prerequisites seemed at first to be a tough task at a small college with an abstract art program – but the personal attention of his professors proved to his benefit and helped him to take full advantage of all available resources.  He worked on the abstracts of composition with Sue Johnson, learned the languages of color and line with Jeff Carr, and mastered realistic renderings with Tom Rowe.  The variety and passion of all their lessons combined to help Graham create a unique portfolio strong enough to compete for a slot in one of the world's six accredited medical illustration programs.  He dedicated his senior year and thesis to researching potential alternatives to animal dissection and experimentation, and graduated from St. Mary's with a Bachelor of Arts in Scientific Illustration (an Independent Student Designed Major) in May of 1995. 
   Graham hiked off the graduation platform and onto the Appalachian Trail for two isolated months before entering the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine at the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland.  There he engaged in a rigorous yet endlessly fascinating course of medical school classes and illustration assignments. The first year curriculum revolved around learning the language of medicine, both scientific and visual.  Gross anatomy dissection consumed the morning hours, while he and his classmates spent afternoons carefully translating the dissected regions into sketches. Second year surgical sketching in the operating room further honed the skills of observation and visual interpretation. The varied curriculum served to create a class of illustrators who could digest difficult scientific jargon and translate the information into effective visual teaching pieces that could suit any specified audience.
   With spare time during his summer internship under Levent Efe in Melbourne, Australia, Graham began researching his thesis and studying the art of 3D computer modeling and animation.  His Masters thesis at Hopkins continued his quest, developed during his undergraduate years, to create effective alternative pedagogy to animal dissection and experimentation.  His thesis was entitled "3D Applications in an Archetype for Education: A Multimedia Computer Frog Dissector with Accompanying Plastic Model."  Dr. David Weishampel and Director Gary Lees served as his preceptors.  After receiving the degree of Master of Arts in Medical and Biological Illustration in May of 1997, Graham then followed Tom Pollard off the graduation platform and across the country to settle into a long term freelance job at the Salk Institute to illustrate this text.
   At first, the prospect of illustrating an entire text on molecular and cellular subject matter seemed dull compared to the surgical sketching days of his graduate training.  Graham soon learned, however, that the passionate quest to catalog, comprehend, and control the "infinitely small" held great potential for artistic input and interpretation. He quickly fell in love with the subject of cell biology and now thirsts like a frontiersman to elucidate mechanisms that have either never been illustrated or have been misunderstood for decades.
   Graham ultimately strives to fulfill his high school dream of educating by making this typically feared subject of cell biology less daunting to his audience.  As with all of his teaching illustrations, he hopes the cell drawings he created for this text will help to fill in the gaps that used to require students to make great leaps of comprehension. Taking inspiration from the work of David Goodsell, Graham aspires to draw everything to scale.  He combines actual scientific data of known structures with simplified iconographic imagery to help students understand and visualize complex molecular topics.  He looks forward to animating all that he has learned about these subjects for future/futuristic editions of this text.
   Graham currently lives and works in Boulder, Colorado. In his free time, he plays soccer and travels into the mountains to mountain bike, snowboard,  and hike.