BY ANNETTE HEIST
Halfway through his PhD program in neuroscience at UPenn, Greg Dunn was inspired to try a new experiment: using the brain structures he was seeing in the lab as the subject matter for his minimalist Asian-inspired paintings.“In grad school, I would be looking at these images all day, and I was already on an Asian-art wavelength,” Dunn says. “One day I saw some images of Golgi-stained neurons, and I thought, ‘They’re sort of similar to these Zen paintings I’ve done.’ So I started experimenting, blowing ink around on a page. And it looked like neurons to me.”