Don’t let practising medicine get in the way of your creativity!

“It’s never too late” was the main message coming out of Visual Arts night this year – never too late to get involved in artistic pursuits and hone the skills you learn to a high level. Striking stories of recent engagement (or re-engagement) with the arts were the order of the night.

Our 2015 Creative Doctors Visual Arts Networking Night was held  on 23^rd April at North Sydney. We saw an array of extraordinary exhibits from talented doctors - some familiar faces and a satisfying number of new ones. We also saw quite wide range of visual arts represented. Judith Babich of Active Locums again provided the venue (a terrific space in North Sydney Community Centre complete with display tables and easels) and the refreshments. 

Richard Wu

Marc Grunseit, former doctor and internationally reknown glass artist, Howard Gwynne, GP psychotherapist newborn as a photographer and Richard Wu, artist and practising psychiatrist, led the way for those whose work we’ve seen before. Marc has been a glass artists for 30 years having made the perilous leap out of medicine and landed safely on the other side. Howard would tell you that he discovered the joys of multiple exposure by chance. You can see some of the results of that chance discovery here. He took the opportunity to show us some of his more playful recent work. Richard Wu showed us works in 3 different styles. His interests include finding a model that ties together Chinese painting, psychotherapy and the neuroscience of creativity. We also saw some more beautiful felting from haematologist Alessandra Bianchi.

Alessandra Bianchi

Newcomers included:

• Kai Lin Lie, GP, who shared her experience of learning to draw as a mature student and showed us examples of the various techniques she has mastered.
• John Wong, GP, who exhibited skillful watercolour landscapes  influenced by his Chinese heritage and stunned us with the news that he only took up painting, or any kind of visual art, 3 years ago.
• Libby Bassett, former GP, who showed some of the extraordinary printmaking work she has done since taking it up in her retirement.
• Robyn Coleman, retired GP and occupational medicine specialist,

  

  Shima Ghedia

  who took up painting with her daughter some years ago to aid her daughter’s recovery from a serious illness and couldn’t stop. The process inspired Robyn to complete a Diploma of Visual Arts and she has exhibited every year since 2006. Robyn  showed us some of her recent pastel paintings.
• Shima Ghedia, emergency medicine specialist,who exhibited artwork and a portfolio of photography
• Barry Wilkins who displayed his stunning photographic landscapes
• Ajesh Shrestha, RMO, who showed us 17 delightful small graphite portraits – a talent he developed as a child growing up in Nepal.  You can see more of Ajesh’s work at here

The New Art of Medicine - Art in Medical Schools

Art therapy is a well established therapeutic modality, helping people recover from a wide range of physical and emotional difficulties, but art education for their doctors is a relatively new idea. It's not aimed at helping doctors manage their own health problems (though that's not a bad idea either) but rather at helping doctors understand what illness is like for their patients.

Artwork by Ted Meyer from his
Structural Abnormalities series

The Huffington Post recently published an article about Ted Meyer who has been guest artist at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA  for the past 5 years. Ted's story of the artistic crisis that occurred for him when he discovered he was not, after all, going to die at 30 is interesting in itself, but the story of the work he does with medical students is even more fascinating

This new way of thinking is even having an impact on the way prospective students in medical schools are being assessed. Dr Salvatore Mangione, Associate Professor of Medicine at Thomas Jefferson University says in an interview with Forbes Magazine in 2013  (you can read it here) that "artistic and visual skills may enhance the ability of a student to excel in medical school and become a successful physician in practice." Interestingly it is suggested that the right brain's visual and imagery skills have been made more important by the visual emphasis of the digital age.

Read the Huffington Post story here and let us know if you are aware of any other similar initiatives in Australian medical schools.

Creative Doctors Needs a Logo

We need your help.

Creative Doctors needs a visual identity and we'd like to invite all our visual artists and would-be visual artists to help us create one.
We plan to have a logo competition soon but we have no prize and no judges just yet. Don't let that stop you from thinking about it though.
We need a simple but meaningful logo to put on our brochures, signs and banners to announce our presence. It needs to resonate with our aim of encouraging creativity in the medical profession in the interests of doctors health and wellbeing.
I'd like it to have some orange in it but that's just me (you've probably noticed already that it's my colour du jour)
Start designing everyone while we work to get the competition up and running. Wouldn't it be great to have our banner flying at Camelot!

DON'T FORGET the next Creative Doctors events for 2015 are:

Writers Night at the Black Dog Institute in Randwick
on 18th June (for logo inspiration read about the award winning Black Dog Institute Logo here )and
Performers Night at the Camelot Lounge in Marrickville on 10th September