My name is Demetra Yancopoulos. I am a Geological Engineer originally from Westchester, New York. Surrounded by local farms, state parks, and reservoirs for drinking water, my childhood was rich with natural beauty.
As an engineer, I am determined to preserve and restore that beauty. As an artist, I am determined to call attention to that beauty, to cultivate a sense of wonder about the natural world so that others might be inspired to protect it, too.
My father has never been much of a gift-giver; it was a bit out of character when he brought home an instructional drawing book for me.
My father has never been much of a gift-giver; it was a bit out of character when he brought home an instructional drawing book for me.
Hardly 6 years old at the time, it is difficult for me to remember if I had already picked up an affinity for creation before the book's arrival onto the scene, though it is without a doubt that afterwards I found myself irreversibly hooked on the act.
Some of my artwork explores the relationship between science or engineering principles and humans or the natural world. Some of my artwork simply highlights something remarkable in the world of science, engineering, or nature.
Given the complexity and variety of these relationships and subjects, I do not limit my art to any single medium or style. I implement everything from traditional oil painting techniques to digital illustration, from hyperrealism to surrealism.
Hardly 6 years old at the time, it is difficult for me to remember if I had already picked up an affinity for creation before the book's arrival onto the scene, though it is without a doubt that afterwards I found myself irreversibly hooked on the act.
Some of my artwork explores the relationship between science or engineering principles and humans or the natural world. Some of my artwork simply highlights something remarkable in the world of science, engineering, or nature.
About the artist
Given the complexity and variety of these relationships and subjects, I do not limit my art to any single medium or style. I implement everything from traditional oil painting techniques to digital illustration, from hyperrealism to surrealism.
The art of science
I consider myself an artist, though I haven't been trained as one.
As a child, I was drawn to all things living: plants, animals, insects, humans. They all seemed to have this indescribable, shared quality.
Maybe it was their symmetry, the way their anatomy could be unlike anything I’d ever seen yet somehow be so correct, so well-suited to the world they existed in. Maybe it was the way they moved - implored by a breeze, or perhaps in those more complex creatures, by some new thought or desire. Maybe it was something I am too grown and too learned to see anymore.
I would sit beside the pond in my childhood home and stare at the frogs on the water’s edge. I watched their lungs inflate and deflate. I wondered how something so small could be so alive, and I wondered if they thought something similar of me. From time to time I tried to catch one, tried to see if I could capture that quality which so often eluded me.
Sometimes, if only for a moment, I did. I felt a frog’s weight in my palm, his tiny feet against my skin, and I understood that there were calculations behind his gaze, that aptitudes and laws governed him in just the same way they governed me.
I would sit beside the pond in my childhood home and stare at the frogs on the water’s edge. I watched their lungs inflate and deflate. I wondered how something so small could be so alive, and I wondered if they thought something similar of me. From time to time I tried to catch one, tried to see if I could capture that quality which so often eluded me.
Sometimes, if only for a moment, I did. I felt a frog’s weight in my palm, his tiny feet against my skin, and I understood that there were calculations behind his gaze, that aptitudes and laws governed him in just the same way they governed me.
Moments like that spawned within me an insatiable urge to understand those aptitudes and laws. I’ve devoted my education to those things - to physics, math, statistics, chemistry, logic, environmental science, geology. These subjects lack an essential part of the equation, though: humanity.
Visual art has been in part a tool for me to internalize all that I learn in science and engineering, and in part a means of sharing my passion for it. Using artwork as a medium to integrate the sciences and the humanities helps me to think critically about the extent of human power, the impact of human inventions, and the need for human restraint.