Cajal, Brain Health, and Visual Inquiry
What made Cajal’s case for neuron theory so strong was how clearly he could see single brain cells. Using a modified version of Golgi’s method on young animal tissue - when neurons haven’t yet formed myelin - he exposed their shape like never before. Since these cells took up the silver stain easily, their edges stood out sharply, becoming visible for the first time.
Look closely at this picture showing part of the brain in a baby - Cajal’s technique clearly works here. Even though nerve cells twist together in tangled patterns, every single one still stands out as distinct. By carefully mapping where axons and dendrites point, Cajal suggested signals travel upward from inner layers to outer regions.
This area links to the precentral gyrus, seen as part of the main motor cortex zone where movements are guided and executed using connections across the brain.
Painting and teaching fill Dawn Hunter’s days at the University of South Carolina’s School of Visual Art and Design (SVAD). She is an Associate Professor, and it was through the award of the Fulbright España Senior Research Fellow grant that she was given unprecedented access to the Cajal archives (Legado Cajal) housed at the Cajal Institute. Through that experience, she researched daily Cajal's original scientific drawings, his sketchbooks and journals, scientific equipment, photography, and personal possessions. Access to these primary sources has given her a unique perspective and understanding of his drawings and the process by which they were made.
Through the act of repeatedly re-drawing Cajal’s scientific illustrations from primary sources, Hunter identified a consistent structural quality that suggested many were executed directly in ink rather than developed through sketching the images in pencil first. This observation led to the hypothesis that Cajal often worked additively—drawing decisively without erasure—both as a pragmatic strategy and as a philosophically accurate means of describing neuronal form. Subsequent examination of Cajal’s sketchbooks and journals at the Instituto Cajal reinforced this interpretation: despite frequent use of pencil and pastels, the absence of erasure points to a confident, decisive approach to mark-making, where resolution itself became a means of perceiving and understanding form.
Dawn Hunter pursued her undergraduate studies at the Kansas City Art Institute, Parsons School of Design, and the Yale Norfolk Summer School of Art & Music. As a Regents Fellow, she received her MFA from the University of California, Davis where she studied with Robert Arneson, Roy DeForest, and Irit Rogoff. She has participated in numerous solo and multiple artist exhibitions throughout the United States and Europe. Additionally, she has also received many awards and grants for her artwork, most notably, a Starr Foundation Fellowship, enabling her to be the first American woman to serve as Artist-in-Residence at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. Her work on Cajal has been widely exhibited and published internationally, most notably at the John Porter Neuroscience Research Center at the National Institutes of Health, where her artwork is displayed alongside seven of Cajal’s original scientific drawings. She is an elected member of the Cajal Club Board of Directors and was awarded the 2017–2018 Fulbright España Senior Research Fellowship to the Instituto Cajal in Madrid. Through ongoing collaboration with researchers at the NIH and the Instituto Cajal, she continues to create artwork and publish scholarly writing on Cajal.