"Come with me. I have something to show you."
Caroline always had something to show me. She grabbed my hand and I walked after her, out the back door, and across the yard to her lab. Her studio. It was both.
Caroline started undergrad in a pre-med program. Then spring semester, freshmen year, she took a painting class to fulfill a general requirement. That was the first time she painted since middle school. That was the first time her gift burst through. Two weeks into the semester, she stacked her Bio 101, Chem 101, and lab workbooks into a makeshift easel. She finished out her science classes that year and then she turned to art. She spent as many hours in the studio as she had in the lab. All the diagrams she studied freshmen year, the specimen slides from high school, and the natural processes she mapped in her mind inspired her paintings.
I catch a glimpse at a canvas she's working on, and the first thing I think of is how she's organizing biology concepts into something the mind can process and memorize. Then I take a step back and see the patterns she finds in nature and how she shapes them with her brush, and I wonder how she makes the two sides of her brain cooperate so beautifully.