- © 2008 Canadian Medical Association
Something Happened Drawings by Jane Martin; Exhibited at The Red Head Gallery, an artist's cooperative, Toronto, Ontario; June 4–28, 2008
Artist Jane Martin's husband began to have difficulty speaking and remembering around Thanksgiving of 2000. Ewen McCuaig was subsequently diagnosed with a glioblastoma and, despite having surgery, radiotherapy and chemotherapy, succumbed to his illness at the end of November 2001.
A well-known Canadian painter, Martin took her first Polaroid of Ewen on Nov. 4, 2000, after his surgery and then hundreds more thereafter. She also kept a journal of his last year, paying close attention to his idiosyncratic and often poetic use of language, as the brain tumour progressed.
Her first drawing, using colour and charcoal pencils, was undertaken 8 months post-operatively. Ironically, her plan to create a visual narrative of “what happened” was delayed by a head injury she herself sustained in a car accident. She returned to the difficult task 3 years later.
Thirty-nine drawings were produced, each entitled with a quirky phrase used by her husband (for example, the image shown here: “The roses are just moving into fabulosity”).
At the vernissage, the exhibit was introduced by Dr. Warren Mason, the neuro-oncologist who treated Ewen at the Princess Margaret Hospital in Toronto, Ontario. Mason spoke of how visual art such as this allows all of us to contemplate the inevitability of death and, in particular, challenges physicians to reflect deeply, as opposed to adopting the usual strategies we all use to distance ourselves from dying patients. He also emphasized that doctors need to choose their language carefully when giving bad news, as those words will become “forever etched” in the minds of those who hear them.
The drawings themselves reflect their Polaroid inception in their simple format. They are strikingly realistic, when compared to Martin's more interpretative, vibrant oil portraits. They are tender, yet unsentimental, as they portray Ewen's gradual disappearance. He becomes more fragile, his skin hangs, his gaze becomes more distracted. All colour gradually vanishes as he does. One of the most striking and moving images is the juxtaposition of roses against his fresh neurosurgical scar.
In an interview, Martin described the work as an act of remembering. She spoke of the conscious artistic choices she made as she selected photographs, then, with pencil in hand, reinvoked Ewen day after day on the page.
This is clearly a trained eye, undertaking a painful, “sometimes dreaded,” yet redeeming task. There is “a little story within each drawing,” each informing the larger “Something” of the collection's title.
The result is a profoundly moving visual account of loss, but one that allows us to imagine our own journey toward death and those we will leave behind.
Footnotes
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Allan Peterkin is head of The Program for Narrative and Healthcare Humanities at Mount Sinai Hospital and a founding editor of ARS MEDICA: A Journal of Medicine, The Arts and Humanities (www.ars-medica.ca)