The application of graphicity to create patterns from the complexities of nature is an activity of modern scientists where it is one of the key approaches to a comprehensive theory of living systems and our place in the universe.  Comprehension of the environment actually lies in the synthesis of two very different approaches, the study of substance (or structure) and the study of form (or pattern).  In the study of structure we measure and weigh things.  Patterns however cannot be measured or weighted; they must be mapped.  To understand pattern we must map a configuration of relationships.  In other words, structure involves quantities, while pattern involves qualities.  Drawing something is an act of comprehension.  However, regarding life itself, there is more to it than the shapes of individuals and the submicrosopic arrangements of atoms and molecules.  This living essence is something non-material and irreducible – a pattern of organisation. Its most important property is that it is a network- pattern.  That is to say, whenever we encounter what are living- organisms, parts of organisms, or communities of organisms- we can observe that the components are arranged in a network fashion.  At the highest levels, predator/prey chains and food webs are good ecological examples. 

A network means that information flows in all directions. In particular, an influence or message may travel along a cyclical path, which then becomes a feedback loop.  For instance, a community by maintaining an active network of communication will learn from its mistakes because the consequences of a mistake will spread through the network and return to the source along feedback loops.  Thus the community can correct its mistakes, regulate itself, and organise itself. 

Recognition of the importance of pattern in science only came in the 1920s.  The most important outcome of the initial research into networks was that the brain was seen as complex of cells that communicate with each other as patterns of intertwined webs nesting within larger webs.  The brain is a networked community of cells with the capacity of self-organisation, and this is how virtual images of environment are produced and modified through perception.  This fundamental networking ability probably resides in the ability of enzymes to set up complex networks that form closed loops.  A mental picture of how such a catalytic network of fifteen enzymes could catalyse each other’s formation, and link up to produce a molecular pattern, was created by the molecular biologist Eigen.

Eigen called his mind maps ‘hypercycles’.  His depiction of a hypercycle is a personal creation that has the balance of lines and an enclosed form characteristic of art.  Important to the present context is that, although a scientist produced the diagram, it exemplifies the process of artistic creativity.  It came into existence to stand for an entity that is too complex to be visualised.  The diagram is a meaningful scientific abstraction that follows a major precept of modern art which states that details are confusing and it is only by selection and emphasis that an artist can get to the real meaning of things. 

It was in the first decades of the 20^th century art began to be taught from the point of view of the mental images of perception. That is to say, reality creates a state of mind that becomes a painting when the person communicates the idea by arranging the right things in the right place within two-dimensions.  It is well documented how this teaching liberated the mind of one student of the time, Georgia O’Keeffe, from the tyranny of having to produce representations of landscapes that did not encapsulate her mental perception of them.  It released her dissatisfied intellect into the realm of non- representational art to paint ‘something I know’.  She invented a personal visual vocabulary, which quickly placed her at the forefront of American modernism. 

O’Keeffe and her modernist contemporaries were essentially investigating patterns in nature to discover how drawing could be used to communicate self.  She was encapsulating in shapes and colours a rich array of human emotions and mental associations suggested by material objects.  Eigen and other neural scientists of the 1970s were trying to discover how scientific ideas about an ‘unseeable’ network of proteins could be communicated as drawings.  Inevitably, science has to use ‘artistic methods’ to depict the patterns it discovers.  Graphicity actually evolved for this very purpose of comprehending how we can control our social evolution.  The depiction of supercycles is obviously useful knowledge.  Scientific diagrams are part of a universal language, underpinned by a precise terminology and an agreed set of international symbols, although the scientists who are at the cutting edge of neural networks are a relatively small subculture of understanding.  This may be contrasted with the subculture grouped around the makers and critics of non-representational works of art.  For example, Georgia O’Keeffe’s picture ‘Black Diagonal’, one of a series of abstract charcoals, utilises her own personal non-verbal language of symbols to represent a particular state of mind.  In this sense it is not a visual aid for viewers to understand her mental discovery.  She put it this way:

Whether it is representational or abstract, each observer is left to translate a picture according to his or her own mindset, whether it is representational or abstract.  The first person to comment on O’ Keeffe’s abstract charcoal drawings, William Murrell Fisher, was struck by their transcendence and found evidence in them of “consciousness…that one’s self is other than oneself, is something larger, something almost tangibly universal, since it is en rapport with a wholeness in which one’s separateness is, for the time, lost”.  He characterised the works as “mystical and musical”.  It is inevitable that this initial idiosyncratic response set the traits in O’ Keeffe’s work that have been of continuing interest to reviewers ever since.  This long-running dialogue is largely confined to a relatively small community of museum curators and art commentators.  It is also an indication of the powerful role of non- representational art in maintaining sub-cultures of understanding that consist of people whose job it is to write about such matters, and who develop a mental allegiance to, and often a commercial interest in, particular artists.