Geometric Abstract Art and Public Health Data

n his " Composition in White, Red, and Yellow, " Dutch artist Piet Mondrian illustrated geometric abstraction. He accomplished this effect via two primary-colored units embedded in a grid of vertical and horizontal black lines that draw viewers to a flat-structured polished web. Mondrian distilled direction to perpendicular columns and rows, color to bright red and yellow and neutral white and black, shape to squares and rectangles, and form to intersecting lines and outlined units. He methodically pared down form to indispensable lines and stacked rich colors in a few blocks. Influenced by analytical cubism, which is renowned for breaking objects and images into components, Mondrian pioneered reductive form and color, through an abbreviated pictorial vernacular. In creating this seemingly simplified painting he championed a distinctive relationship between color and blocks, rendering asymmetric balance and harmony. Black, bordering pigmented zones, creates a maze reflecting mathematical accuracy and distinct complexity. Moving a single line or changing one color might disrupt subtle accord and structural delineations. The painting portrays minimal, yet essential, information through blatant intersections, geometric shapes, and interlocking planes. While thick black lines separate blocks, the arrangement and colors radiate energy that is both kinetic and serene, stimulating and restful, dynamic and static. Mondrian imparted a delicate balance between unequal and equivalent counterparts by using indispensable and contrasting positive and negative energies of solid and void, horizontal and vertical. Similar to the balance in Mondrian's painting, corresponding energies of time and space, art and science, and medicine and public health create momentum and energy in our compartmentalized and integrated personal and professional experiences. As public health specialists, we analyze microscopic images as well as gigantic amounts of clinical, public health, and geospatial data to develop interventions that enhance individual and population health. Through intricate scientific and geostatistical methods, scientists and healthcare providers assess relationships between risk factors and disease and between behaviors