Graphic Medicine

OK. Comics… I'm getting there

I'd been exhibiting my work for several years, landscape based, abstracted paintings and intaglio prints, and avoiding any overt medical subject matter, for fear of it coming out all… ewww, yucky, sentimental, melodramatic. I felt too close to the subject matter, too embedded and conditioned to make anything worthwhile. I think the best art that takes medical or biological subjects as its starting point is produced by artists who come at the subject with a fresh, uncorrupted viewpoint (although, granted, they may have just as many presuppositions as scientists who try to make art). I think when someone approaches a discourse like medicine and wants to make art based on something within it, it is best approached from a neutral position. Some artists seem to get excited by medicine or scientific subjects and are able to introduce radical new viewpoints, although I've also seen unsubtle, axe-grinding narrative work that is informed by some previous bad experience and ingrained prejudice. You'd think that the great critics of medicine like Foucault would be taught at medical school wouldn't you? Nope. I doubt there are many medical students or doctors or nurses who have even heard of him, let alone read him.

Well, I was feeling rather… torn, fragmented. There was no bridging factor between my work as an artist and my three days a week as a doctor. Maybe that was a good thing, there is, after all, no inherent reason why we should integrate all the facets of our lives, but nevertheless I felt the urge to try to find some link. I think the main factor I felt was lacking was some common language with which to discuss the two areas. Then a friend of mine, a well read GP who is into poetry and literature, introduced me to to the relatively new, interdisciplinary field of Medical Humanities, which uses the "conceptual tools" of the arts and humanities to examine the field of Medicine. I felt I had found my niche. I enrolled on a part time MA course based in Swansea University.

I'd thoroughly recommend going back to university as a mature student. I've done it twice now. I really enjoyed the taught modules of the MA, a crash course in philosophy, history, literature, theology, sociology and anthropology. I thought I'd end up writing my dissertation on the visual arts in medicine, but to be honest, I never found anything that really floated my boat. I'd really enjoyed studying narrative and decided to apply some basic narratology to an old love of mine: comics and graphic novels. This seemed like an excellent excuse to spend a great deal of time reading comics in the name of research. I decided I'd try to find everything I could in the comics form that related to medicine, or stories of illness and suffering.

Of course, once you start looking…

I've built a website dedicated to the subject:

www.graphicmedicine.org

more on comics next posting, we're getting the contextual part out of the way first.

I'm based in North Wales and I'm a painter and printmaker. My work to date has been generally based on the landscape. It is abstracted, although it contains narrative elements. I'm a member of the Regional Print Centre in Wrexham. In fact I'm starting this blog after attending a seminar at the print centre, when Andrew Bryant extolled the benefits of blogging on Artists Talking.

Let me tell you about my younger self: although I was "good at art" in school, I was something of an idealist and thought I could "do some good" as a doctor: eradicate disease, or at least build a hospital for orphans, so I went to medical school rather than art school (note: this attitude reflects the way I felt at the time, not the way I feel today and should in no way be taken to suggest that I think art "does no good"). This career choice was possibly influenced by watching TV medical dramas and comedies and thinking that a doctors life looked like fun. At medical school, my guard weakened by alcohol, I was refashioned into a medical professional: a process that involved various initiation rites, desensitisation and sleep deprivation. Mostly I had quite a good time, it was wild, but it was also somewhat brutalising. I was young and sensitive on entering medical school and came out young and sensitive and a bit screwed up. I continued to paint and draw, look at and read about art. I kind of taught myself and, inevitably my work tended to look somewhat like the artists I admired- mostly british painters of the 40's, 50's and 60's. I guess if I'd gone to art school it would have looked like british painters of the 1980's. I started exhibiting in 1997 and, in 1999 I decided i needed some critical input, so I went to do a postgraduate certificate at Chester University. Then my work changed and I got into printmaking. I went part time in medicine and started to try to concentrate on making work and getting it shown. I've always avoided medical subject matter in my work, feeling too "embedded" and thinking it would turn out too "worthy", naff or melodramatic. You know the kind of stuff. Or at least I've never consciously put it in, others do see anatomical elements in the work. I love the landscape of North Wales so I used that as my subject matter. I moved here because I was into climbing. I spent all the time I could in the hills, and that came out in the work.

I'm still working part time in medicine; if I gave it up I'd have to teach (which I'm not qualified to do) or try and get grant money. I sell work through a couple of galleries but not enough to live on.

I'll move onto comics in my next post. First, here are some images of some recent work.

I've got most of my work on my website at www.ian-williams.co.uk