A Q&A with SE CASC Resident Artist Emily Nastase for World Art Day

April 15th is UNESCO’s World Art Day, an international celebration of fine arts and a time for us to promote and enjoy the art around us. We sat with 2022-23 Global Change Fellow and current SE CASC artist in residence, Emily Nastase – who is illustrating iconic study species of the Southeast – to chat about her artistic background, research, and what artists and scientists might learn from each other. 

What is your background and what got you interested in scientific illustration?

I was always into art as a kid. It was one hobby that I kept up with for a long time. Going into my senior year of high school, I didn’t know what I wanted to do for college. Kind of on a whim, I applied to Art School at Virginia Commonwealth University. Their art program is really well known, and I was very lucky, and I got in. Since I wasn’t sure what I wanted to do as a career, I thought, you know, give art school a try and see what I can make out of it. Worst case I could just transfer if I decided I didn’t like it. 

My freshman year ends, and it was a really amazing experience. I ended up in a major called Communication Arts, which is drawing, painting, graphic design—all of those things combined into one major. And within that, they have a discipline for scientific illustration. It’s really well-suited for students that are technical, people that are very detail oriented, and I was all about it. Then I realized that I really liked science in the process, too. So that’s sort of where my path starts to split, because I came into this field from the arts initially, but then through art, I realized how much I enjoyed learning science. Because I had to get a biology minor to do scientific illustration, I decided to take it one step further and get a double major in biology.

After I graduated, I worked for about four years as a science communicator, which is a really good fit between the two disciplines. It was the best of both worlds! But as a science communicator, I was mostly doing graphic design and writing, I wasn’t doing a whole lot of illustrating at the time and I wasn’t doing much science. I was communicating other people’s science. I realized then that I wanted to do my own research. That’s when I made a career jump and joined the PhD program here at NC State. But I’ve always kept illustration and painting on the back burner. It’s such a valuable tool to have, and I’ll always be able to communicate my own work. But I also just do it because I love it.

Can you talk a little bit about the artwork you’re doing with SE CASC? 

The illustrations that I’m doing for SE CASC are meant to highlight some of the really unique study species that are involved in the SE CASC research projects. We wanted a diversity of species represented and talked over different species that could be considered for the illustrations. Eventually we narrowed it down to six that we thought were representative of different taxa. There are some birds and plants and mammals and fish on the list. 

Besides the diversity of species, what specifically drew you to those six species as subjects for these illustrations?

The six species that we picked are very cool species from the Southeast region that are definitely worth illustrating and showcasing. A few were very easy to choose. One is my study species, the Henslow’s Sparrow. It’s a bird I’ve been studying for four years now, and I have a very strong passion for it. Then the others were representative of other people’s research projects. But beyond that, they all happen to be really beautiful species in their own way. 

As both a scientist and an artist, how do those two identities and processes inform each other?

This is something that I think is so under-appreciated. I think there’s a lot more overlap between the sciences and the arts than people realize, and having a background in both has made me a well-rounded researcher and influenced my work in a positive way. Because of my artistic background, I’m good at communicating what I do—I’m always happy to illustrate or present or write about my work, and share that with people. And when you share something with people that’s aesthetically pleasing it invites them into your research. 

Then from the science side, you need to be able to understand the species that you’re trying to illustrate and not misrepresent some aspect of its ecology when you’re painting it. There is the more rigorous side that goes into the scientific illustration that you get from being a scientist that maybe a traditional artist wouldn’t appreciate as much. But that’s another part of scientific illustration that I think is so cool—it involves research. Just to do the illustration and make sure that you’re representing it correctly requires the artist to learn about the species. 

I think both disciplines inform each other, but people are so quick to put themselves into boxes like, ‘Oh, I’m a scientist,’ or ‘Oh, I’m an artist,’ so I don’t understand where the other person is coming from. But we have an amazing capacity to blend these concepts in our brains and to use them to inform each other. When we do that, it makes our work so much better, and so much more fulfilling, too.

World Art Day is all about promoting awareness of creative activity worldwide. Do you have some favorite artists or art that you would like to share?

Someone that’s always inspired me in scientific illustration is Margaret Mee. She was a botanical illustrator from England, and she would do all these expeditions down to the Amazon. She had firsthand experience painting some of the really rare and beautiful flora there. She was a bit of a pioneer for her time—this was happening in the 1950s—and she was doing these rough, back-country expeditions with researchers. She was such an inspiration to be able to do those kinds of trips and to paint these amazing species that no one had ever heard of before. And her work is beautiful! There’s something really timeless about it.

The other art that I get inspiration from is more of the painterly landscapes, and people being creative with their styles. It’s the opposite end of the spectrum from scientific illustration… One is intended to be really detailed and representative and the other is meant to paint how you feel and how you perceive the world. I have an appreciation for both sides of the spectrum and I try to experiment a little bit with both of them.

What do you hope people take away from your art?

I think the point of most scientific illustration is to communicate some kind of information, so I think an accurate representation of what you’re illustrating is really important. Hopefully, someone can learn something about what you’re showing them. Another huge part of this is just to get people to start noticing the things that are around them, and maybe to have a newfound appreciation for something that’s in their day to day life that they haven’t stopped to look at before. And I think illustrations can really show things in a really beautiful way, too.