Dilaudid Land
Cortney Davis
About the artist:Â
Cortney Davis, a nurse practitioner, is the author of five poetry collections, most recently Leopold’s Maneuvers, winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Her most recent nonfiction publication is The Heart’s Truth: Essays on the the Art of Nursing. An illness narrative in words and images, entitled Twenty-Six Days: When the Nurse Became a Patient, is forthcoming in Spring 2015 from Kent State University Press. On the lighter side, she enjoys serving as poetry editor of Alimentum: The Literature of Food. Her website is cortneydavis.com.
About the artwork:
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Empty, Scarred, Full of Love
Karen Peacock
About the artist:Â
Karen Peacock is a board-certified art therapist in private practice in Memphis, TN. “Using art to express my experiences provides a unique perspective, often bringing equilibrium to emotions that may be hard to express verbally.”
About the artwork:
“After giving birth to my son, I reached for art materials to express the complexity of emotions I was experiencing. This image, created with crayons and ink pen, depicts the contrasting feelings of physical emptiness and emotional fullness, as well as feelings of being physically scarred and emotionally loved.”
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Breathless Glitter
Maria Lupo
About the artist:Â
Maria Lupo is a registered art therapist in New Jersey. She holds masters degrees in fine arts and in counseling psychology and serves as the chair of the New Jersey Alliance for Arts and Health. The recipient of the 2010 Outstanding Professional in the Arts award from the Arts Council of the Morris Area, she exhibits her artwork nationally. “I have trusted art all my life as a way to cope and heal.”
About the artwork:
Breathless Glitter, mixed media: oxygen mask used while transporting the artist’s mother to the
Grief and Gratitude
Alan Blum
About the artist:Â
Alan Blum is a Professor and Gerald Leon Wallace MD Endowed Chair in Family Medicine at the University of Alabama School of Medicine in Tuscaloosa. A self-taught artist, he has published three books of his sketches and stories of patients, and his artworks have appeared in more than a dozen medical journals and textbooks. He is a frequent guest speaker at medical schools in courses in the humanities.
About the artwork:
“This sketch in ballpoint pen on the back of a prescription pad is of a woman I helped care for more than twenty-five years ago. During her first visit to the family-practice clinic, I had listened to her poignant history and
Premature
Daniel Wong
About the artist:Â
Daniel Wong is a recent Stanford graduate with plans to attend medical school. He is interested in the creative bond between art and medicine and the power of artistic expression to foster healing. Daniel finds art to be a unique method of human communication and finds visual arts a fascinating means of forming deep psychological connections with others. He works primarily in oils. More of his work can be found at dwong.net.
About the artwork:
“When I was in the womb, my mother’s OB-GYN looked at the ultrasound and congratulated her: it was a girl! Though he realized his error later, I often wonder about my mother’s
Dying Woman
Gary Hoff
About the artist:Â
I am Associate Professor of Medicine at the Des Moines University College of Osteopathic Medicine where I have taught cardiology for many years. My career as an artist runs in parallel with my career in medicine. My work is primarily in oils and consists of commissioned portraits as well as landscapes and still life.
About the artwork:
“Dying Woman is a portrait of my mother during the last month of her life, as she was dying of metastatic lung cancer. The drawing is in an old medium called silverpoint, which was the method used by old master painters long before graphite. It allows a precise but unerasable line
Gentle Men
Alan Blum
Editor’s Note: This week, Pulse once again presents sketches by Alan Blum, a family physician who for years has been jotting down visual impressions and snippets of conversation as he cares for patients. These sketches go back as far as 35 years, representing patients who have died or with whom he lost touch because of geographic relocation. These drawings are from the recently published book Gentle Men (Firebrand Press).
About the author:
Alan Blum is a professor of family medicine and holds the Gerald Leon Wallace endowed chair in family medicine at the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, where he also directs the Center for the Study of Tobacco and Society. In 1977 he co-founded