Neurons in Motion
Paintings inspired by fluorescence microscopy images of cultured neurons: cells on a dish, stimulated by electrodes seated on microchips. In the laboratory, color is a decision and contrast dyes are used to enhance the visibility of cells. They bind to different structures inside the cell, and each is assigned a channel so that one cell can be told from another. The color exists to make the cells readable. In the paintings color through paint and resin is asked to hold light, to carry movement, to give a neuron life. What the microscope renders as data, the paintings hold as color and life. This page collects the work made so far alongside the imagery behind it.
Fueled from Within
Modeled on microscope immunofluorescent images of neurons and astrocytes, the support cells around neurons. These are the two cell types at the heart of a scientific debate over whether brain cells make their own fuel or get fed by their neighbors. Alex’s research found evidence for the former. This is my very first painting.
- Medium
- Resin and acrylic on panel
- Dimensions
- 30 × 40 in
The Metabolic Field
Painting based on real stained microscopic images that show a slice of brain tissue stained to reveal the location of every cell, which of the cells are neurons, and how active a particular energy-related process is in each one. It is a snapshot of cell identity defined as metabolic activity in the brain and a snapshot of what’s happening in the moment. A field of color built up from hundreds of small individual shapes and several resin pours in a cooler register meant to capture the sense of depth, layering, and movement that living neurons have under a microscope. One dye lights up cell centers in blue, another lights up neurons in red, and a third lights up a specific molecule in green.
- Medium
- Resin and acrylic on panel
- Dimensions
- 30 × 40 in
Full Burn
The sister piece to The Metabolic Field with same source imagery, same dot-by dot and resin pour with pursuit of depth and movement in the cells but build in a warm register, focusing on purples, deep reds, high-saturation orange. This image shows a more sparsely populated field of neurons with individual cell nuclei spread out with visible space between them; it is quieter and less densely packed view of the same kind of tissue. It is a different feeling, the way the same field of cells can read as calm or intense depending on color and density alone.
- Medium
- Resin and acrylic on panel
- Dimensions
- 30 × 40 in
Neuron
One single neuron, working hard and firing without break, showing how it changes the way it fuels itself under stress. Like a muscle that is asked to keep contracting nonstop without break between reps. When you make a brain cell work non-stop instead of letting it rest, it doesn’t just get tired it starts running on a different kind of fuel than it normally would. This neuron is caught in that act. The dots around it are the switch to the different fuel happening. This image of the neuron also inspired The Biological Computing Co company logo. These two cells here are intricately connected, exchanging signals whose changing patterns give rise to what we understand as learning. This delicate dance shapes how we experience the world, and a single wrong turn can reinforce the very behaviors I later encounter in my work as a psychotherapist.
- Medium
- Resin and acrylic on panel
- Dimensions
- 36 × 48 in
Living Circuit
Modeled directly on real lab imaging: cells grown on a circuit-patterned surface, photographed in layered channels, one lighting up the circuit traces themselves in green, another showing the density of cell growth in orange laid one on top of the other. Circuit lines rendered clean and geometric, the cell material rendered loose and organic, both occupying the same surface inspired by what cells on a chip setup looks like under a microscope. Neurons and circuit boards drawn as one continuous structure.
- Medium
- Resin and acrylic on panel
- Dimensions
- 24 × 36 in
About the Artist
Sofia Ksendzovsky is a painter and mental health clinician working at the intersection of art, clinical psychology, and neuroscience. Trained in clinical psychology and licensed as a marriage and family therapist, she spent two decades attending directly to the minds of people. In the studio she attends to the mind at the scale of a cell.
Her ongoing series, Neurons in Motion, is drawn from fluorescence microscopy of living neurons: dye-stained cells cultured on a dish, seated on microchips, and stimulated by electrodes as part of her brother's research into biological computing. The paintings are built in layers of acrylic beneath poured resin, mimicking the mounting medium used on microscope slides to bring out detail in a painting as it does in a cell. What emerges is layered stain, structure buried under structure, electrical light glowing up through color, a sense of movement and life force coming through the canvas. Three registers run across the work: the field, dense all-over cellular abstraction; the portrait, a single neuron given the space of a figure; and the substrate, the electrode arrays and circuitry the cells are grown on.
Sofia has made art all her life, moving between figurative painting, ceramics, jewelry design, and stained glass. She arrived at neurons through a long interest in scientific research and through her brother's work, first in epilepsy and later in biological computing. Her own research background is in cognitive psychology at Georgia State University and in the Adult Development and Cognition Lab at Georgia Tech, before an M.A. in clinical psychology at Pepperdine University and two decades of clinical practice, clinical supervision, and behavioral health leadership.
She is interested in making that research legible to people who will never look through a microscope, and in working in dialogue with the scientists whose imagery she paints. Bilingual in English and Russian, she lives and works in San Francisco. Neurons in Motion is ongoing and is being made toward exhibition.
- Based in
- San Francisco
- Practice
- Painter and mental health clinician
- Series
- Neurons in Motion, ongoing
In the studio she attends to the mind at the scale of a cell.
From the artist's biography
Future Art currently being worked on:
