So here's this poor geezer getting savagely attacked by proteins.
The hard thing here was, having got hold of that delicious celtic knotwork of the Der p protein, not to carry on in a similar vein to make a grand schematic of how the protein interacts with everything else, using similar kinds of information. (If you want to see someone do that, and do it very beautifully, look at the great David S. Goodsell's work.) But my brief is to make pictures of how I understand or might go about reaching an understanding, rather than what I understand or might be able to understand. If I take a line out of the messy confusion of Everything, I come to some conclusions, how do I then assimilate that back into my messy conception of Everything? I want to dig into the process of this, you see, rather than presenting a product.
And the problem is, not how you make pictures of stuff you do understand - that's just ordinary work, has a beginning middle and end and you know when you've done it - but how you make representations which give proper acknowledgement of what you don't fully understand or know about or feel you have a poor or incomplete grasp of. Which is where all the fun is.
Well hooray for the linguistic gymnastics of paint. Here, for instance, I can use these little fluorescent dots (activity) to suggest active sites on the molecule (activity) and the itchy experience of allergy (activity). And that's the sort of thing people get very easily, without even having to think they've thought about it.
