Mysterious Anatomy

Art was not particularly valued or encouraged when I was growing up, and although I loved art classes in school, by my early 20s I was married and pursuing a PhD in Microbiology together with an MD degree.

As an attempt to relax a bit from the rigors of studying, I began drawing. I soon realized that a completely different world had opened for me, a world in which I could produce images that were uniquely my own. It wasn’t too long before I signed up for drawing and painting lessons. 

Before completion of my medical school training, I took a year off to attend art classes, further reinforcing my desire to include art in my life.

In the years that followed, however, my pediatric residency, genetics fellowship, private pediatric practice, and raising a family interfered with creating art.

It was not until I left my pediatric practice in 1998 that I began to paint again—and I have not stopped since then.

Initially, most of my work was realistic—still life, models or copying from photographs.

This nurtured that part of my brain that craved creativity, but I felt that what I was doing was not particularly original.  
In 2019, I left my full-time job as a Medical Director for a large healthcare insurance company and became a medical consultant.

When the pandemic began in early 2020, most of my consulting opportunities vanished and I decided to fully retire from medicine.  

Since then, I have been devoting more and more of my time to painting, working alone or as part of an online community.

In early 2022, I saw a photograph of an artistic work that was very organic in nature, with circles, curved lines, ovals, curlicues, and arcs.

I produced a painting with different organic lines but with similar elements, and in the end, found that many aspects of this painting resembled anatomic shapes. (After four decades in medicine, this didn’t come as such a surprise!)

I titled my work “Mysterious Anatomy”—and it is this work of art that sparked an urge to create other representations of internal and external anatomy, along with distortions of shapes and colors that I collectively call the Mysterious Anatomy series.

Were it not for my medical training, I doubt that I would be imagining how anatomic shapes might be transformed into new, interesting images. The colors I use in many of my paintings are not anatomically correct, but perhaps they could be in some alternative universe...

Although I regret the gap in artistic time that occurred while I was in residency and later office practice, I feel those years helped me refocus on my love for artistic creativity when I finally resumed painting and drawing in the late 90s.

I also believe that if I had continued to paint during those gap years, I might not be where I am today.

Perhaps the connection to my medical background would be suppressed, or different, and there would be no Mysterious Anatomy.