Graphic Medicine

I've just got home from a weekend at the Hay Festival and feeling inspired to do some writing. With limited time before bed, I'm torn between adding a post here, or doing some drawing. The blog wins, but mainly through a sense of duty: I've only just started it and I feel I should add something regularly, but lets leave comics and medicine for tonight and let me tell you about Hay: if you don't know, its a literary festival, and has become so successful it is now being exported and copied all over the world. It is very well organized and terribly…civilised, in a well spoken, slightly left wing, intellectual kind of way.

I went to a talk by Jake and Dinos Chapman, chaired by Tim Marlowe. I admire their work because I tend to like things that are made to deliberately offend the common sensibility (providing, I guess, that it doesn't contain real violence or animal cruelty or whatever). They were, by turns, deliberately obnoxious, ascerbic, puerile, incisive and funny. Jake seemed to do most of the talking. I did quite like some of their ideas; I'm not that keen on fine art that has an obvious moral message, and positive insight can come out of occasionally exposing oneself to the gruesome or gothic. (although having the choice to do so, it should be remembered, is a privilege) In the end I decided that I preferred to look at their work than listen to them talk, and left feeling rather unsure as what to think: are they really as mean as they seem to make out?

I was sitting on the second row. In front of me sat a guy with long grey hair and a grey beard. At his feet was balanced a canvas bearing a painted portrait of the brothers. He seemed poised to make some sort of approach to the stage. I couldn't get a clear view of the portrait but it looked to me like it was rendered in a naive style. "Shit", I thought, "he's going to present them with the painting, this could be mortifying". In the end, he wanted them to sign it, making his move after the ending applause died down. I hung back slightly and waited to see if he'd get his wish or whether he'd be told to "Fuck Off". He got his wish: as I left I saw Jake, seeming to overcome a moment of puzzlement, signing his name across the forehead of his painted avotar. I later saw they grey haired man walking around carrying his canvas and wondered what he was going to do with it: was it simply a piece of fandom to proudly display to his friends or some sort of comment on authorship, or was he going to stick it on ebay?

So… I started to read loads of graphic novels and trawled comics sites and shops for anything that could conceivably be of medical relevance. I wanted to see whether reading these works gave some insight into the situations of experiences they described- or rather I assumed they would give some insight but I wanted to work out what made comics a good medium for portraying these experiences. Not that I was coming up with any great new theory here- there is plenty of "comics theory" out there, some of it if fairly highbrow. A good place to start, if you want to understand how the medium works is Scott McCloud's classic "Understanding Comics" (1993).

When selecting material I didn't want to "over medicalise" life: as a GP you are presented, day in day out, with everything from neighbour's squabbles over bin bags to life threatening illness, and there is a tendency nowadays to think that everything is in someways medical- smelly feet, or shyness, or "anger problems" or bereavement. This is partly caused by control freak medics appropriating everyday occurrences, partly the fault of "big pharma", inventing new conditions for their new expensive drugs to treat, and partly caused by those people who look for answers to all of life's problems in a pill.

I decided to include stories that dealt with situations or conditions that might reasonably present to a GP surgery, like cancer, epilepsy, mental illness etc. I wanted to construct an argument along the lines that comics would be a useful resource for health professionals, giving some understanding of what it is like to suffer a particular condition of care for somebody who has that condition. What the arts and literature give, that textbooks don't, is an insight into how it feels to experience something, and I think comics, with its combination of text and image is well set up to provide acres of detail.

You know when you are reading a comic strip and, in the corner of each panel there may be another sequential story going on, something in the background? Like a mouse engaged in some humorous activity outside his hole in the skirting board while a the family discuss something at the dining table? Or the artist includes a little arrow pointing at, say, a pile of letters with a little caption heading the arrow that says "love letters"? Well comics can provide loads of visual footnotes and subsidiary information in each panel alongside the main story.

You may think I'm stating the bleeding obvious here, but there is more to follow.

ref: McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding comics. New York: Harper Collins

So, I spent ages reading graphic novels and comics that I felt were relevant to medicine. My idea was that they might be of use as a resource for health professionals. We were all into comics as children, I'd read them through my teens-american underground commix, I was never into super-heroes, and, after hiatus of many years had started reading graphic novels and autobiographical art comics again some years back. Academics have been writing about graphic fiction for years; there is plenty of comics theory around, and I think I have read a good proportion of it, but no one in the anglophone countries had systematically studied medical narrative in comics, although certain scholars had reviewed selected graphic novels or looked at historic comics. In France Videlier and Piras had published La Sante dans les Bandes Dessinees in 1992 (sorry, francophones, I can't get this blog editor to show accents) but there is nothing equivalent in English that I know of.

It's late and I'm tired. Just wanted to get this blog off to a good start. Will add more shortly.

here is some more work of mine

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