Art is powerful preventive medicine. Looking at a picture is like walking through an endless series of doors, with each succeeding door leading us deeper and deeper into a rich experience.This journey stimulates our minds, our emotions, our souls; it makes us more alive. Ultimately the esthetic experience heals us and makes us whole. -- Robert Pope, Illness and Healing, Images of Cancer, 1991.
Susan Gubar in a February 7, 2014 NY Times essay, Living with Cancer: An Artist's View writes: "Though we accept ambiguity in art, it is harder to accept in science, harder still in medicine."
Robert Pope (1956-1992) was a dedicated Nova Scotia artist who died of Hodgkin’s Disease at the age of 36 after a ten year battle with the illness. (The link to the Rpbert Pope Foundation is not live now.) His work "reminds us that often patients and caregivers cannot fathom what we sign up for. Even when physicians try to communicate the consequences of their prescriptions, patients need to make a leap of faith.
"Mr. Pope’s paintings make one wonder: Is cancer treatment a form of religion, a means of transformation that involves its own rituals, trials, high priests, sacraments, vestments and bodily signs for people in need of a miracle and convinced that we have to be stripped of everything before we can be reborn?"
Even after two weeks, Susan Gubar's article still resonates with me. Read it if you have a chance, and the moving comments as well.