First Shot

I dissent

A few months after the death of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in the fall of 2020, a striking portrait of her — eight stories high — started rising over the city of San Jose, Calif. It is an artistic version of Sebastian Kim’s iconic photograph of her — famous dissent collar on, red lips and earrings and an Italian cotton mesh glove posed as if flashing her own erudite gang sign — justice. Its geometry is the hallmark of its artist, biomedical engineer Dr. Chuba Oyolu ’00-02, who didn’t discover he was an artist until he was a graduate student at Stanford University.

“I didn’t know I could draw until I was about 27. The stress of grad school made me look for an outlet,” he said. On the way home from soccer practice one day, he stopped in a book shop and came across a book on the Renaissance artist Michelangelo. “I was really enthralled. I bought the book and read it front to back in about a week. Then I bought every other book on Michelangelo I could find and read them all too.” That winter break, he started drawing. “After about a dozen intuitive nudges, I literally just picked up a pencil and started scribbling, and that’s when it dawned on me that the natural ability had lain dormant deep within me all along.” He began practicing hours each day, developing his own unique style that uses complex shapes to make up larger pictures. He calls it Geometric Symbolism. “That’s where the engineer in me intrudes,” he said.

“The unique style of art I developed probably came from seeing so many surgeries as a grad student. I saw so many, many intricate striations under the superficial fleshy layer of the human body that I started to see them everywhere. I developed a lexicon of about 40 shapes that I can use over and over again in my work. It just intuitively feels right.” Oyolu’s work has progressed to the point where he spends more than half his time on his art, but still does a considerable amount of scientific work as a biomedical engineering consultant. You can follow his work on Instagram at @chubaoyolu.

Daniel Dentone