Tim Conaway is a heavy set middle-aged man with a two-day growth of beard and a taciturn demeanor. His colored pencil and ink drawings are landscapes filled with light and life, portraying entirely imagined locales.
Gretchen Cameron has the wide-open smile and friendliness of a 10-year-old though she’s nearly 40 years of age. Her patchwork dog, Ginger, and her grinning mosaic self-portrait reflect her big heart while her disability keeps her from being able to tie her shoes.
Clayton Hauer’s cerebral palsy is physically evident in his twisted legs and thick-lensed eyeglasses, but his ebullient personality and his eagerness to impart information from his vast store of knowledge belie his handicap. He’s working on an illustrated science fiction novel and displays a portrait of his blonde haired 5-year old protagonist, “Dr. Reality.” His second piece, a symbolic mosaic, inspired by a visit to the House of Blues, is thick with colored beads and depicts the yin-yang mandala and all the signs of the zodiac.
The artists all work at Sophie’s Art Gallery, a program of St. Madeleine Sophie’s Center in San Diego. Ted Meyer, artist-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA curated an exhibition of the gallery’s artists in the lobby of the school’s Learning Resource Center.
I Am Me! A Collection of Self Portraits, by artists with developmental disabilities, is part of an ongoing effort to use art to help train medical students to be compassionate caregivers, sensitive to a patient’s point of view. Meyer works with Senior Associate Dean for Medical Education, LuAnn Wilkerson, and Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences Professor Margaret L. Stuber, to integrate the use of art into The Doctoring Program, a revolutionary empathy-building concept first introduced at UCLA in 1990.
“We also have interesting shows like the last one which is really about infectious disease,” said Stuber. “It showed bacteria and fungus and all kinds of interesting things like that. And so we coordinated that with a block that we have for the medical students that’s on infectious disease and immunology.”
Meyer himself experienced many years as a patient. He spent his childhood in and out of hospitals for treatment of Gaucher’s disease and his work has been influenced by those experiences. More recent creations deal with other people’s illnesses. “Scarred for Life,” his series of mono-prints taken directly off the skin of his subjects and accented with gouache and color pencil, represent physical and emotional turning points in these patients’ lives.
Stuber values the artist-in-residence program for its relatability for today’s medical students.
“It does some linkages that I think we used to do with written material, with stories, poetry, etcetera," she said. "But in our computer age, it seems like we have to do something either on the computer or something that’s visual. So the visual arts are working very well in terms of being able to make those kinds of human connections.”
The handful of medical students who came to the presentation by the Sophie’s Gallery artists all told Patch in video interviews that the experience would certainly have a profound effect on the way they will practice medicine.
