A Doctor, An Artist;

Who am I, How did I get here, and Why?

I am both a Doctor and an Artist and at last can pursue both of my passions. In our family we joke a lot about right brain vs left brain characteristics. I use my left brain more as a physician and my right brain to create art, but find a strong commonality in both pursuits. In the introduction to “The Art of Anatomy” by Benjamin Rifkin I found an eloquent explanation that makes me feel much less schizophrenic:
“ In our age of increasingly narrow technology, we still begin with the body, the province of schools of art and schools of medicine. Medical students press through the aromatics of boiled linen, disinfectant, and formaldehyde, making the rounds of formal lectures, half-draped patients, and stripped cadavers.
...Art students, half-nourished by a miasma of primed linen turpentine, and chalk, study the undraped model in life class, practice the diagrams of geometric perspective, and memorize the skeleton and muscles in anatomy. ... With kindred presumptions
of benefice, the doctor studies the body to improve its fate: the artist to improve its spirit.”
I did not go to art school, though I would have liked to. I always made art and developed a love of oil painting as a child. The introductory art instruction everyone gets in school fired me up only to be frustrated at being denied further instruction because of scheduling conflicts with Latin, or calculus, or English seminar. So I painted at home, read books about artists, illustrated poems for friends. Even this amount of creativity was squeezed out by the demands of Medical School and Residency. So after 7 years of medical education I was busting at the seams to paint. I paint because I must. It is in me and it must come out. I love the smell, the process, the planning, the construction, the study. After starting a new Family Practice group, which entails practicing medicine and building and running a small business, it is a relief to rest the verbal left brain and immerse myself in pure observation, color, line, shape, shadow, illusion and perception.
Art for me is a subconscious force I can not explain and cannot deny. Another quote helps me express it. In an article in “Artist” magazine entitled “Drawing from the heart” Juliette Aristides writes:
"I see painting as an act of illumination of working though darkness to the light. Light is the great reveler of things. ... I find it fascinating that there are in life these moments when you realize that something important is happening; that an experience will never be reproduced that it will fade and be forgotten, never to be reclaimed – unless you paint it. To have the ability and have attained the skill to paint that kind of moment, to record that kind of revelation, is insanely wonderful.”
So why continue to practice medicine, a very jealous mistress and a great consumer of time, energy and soul? I quote one of my mentors, Dr. Lewis Barnett from his book “Between the Lines” where he describes to young doctors the connection between the doctor and the patient, something he calls “the Both... that moment when there is a reaching toward each other... This moment of potential magic must address not only the two persons, but also the delicate space between them– the relationship. The quality of this space determines in large measure, the potential power toward the healing process, of which we (doctors) are only one part. A person’s trust in us, faith in us and loyalty toward us generates the majesty and magic to bring about improvement or help one tolerate an incurable state.” So the Why is all about spirit and moments, the How is on going, and the Who...? Well now I am known by some as the doctor that paints, perhaps I will also be known as a painter who doctored.

Bruce W Hughes MD