Life Imitates Art

Last week on Thursday we had an assignment: Go to the British Art Museum and practice/hone our observation skills. Most people in my class thought this assignment was a little touchy-feely and crazy (and fit in the typical Yale emphasis on emotion in doctoring) and they spent a good deal of the time making fun of it or laughing about it. However, for someone who is desperately wanting to learn something non-science related for just a LITTLE BIT of balance, I was REALLY excited. Before coming to class we read a JAMA article about this skill-building session (perhaps so the science-folks took it more seriously), and I learned that this session was started by two medical students here for their thesis, adopted, and since then has been adopted at many other institutions (20 if I remember correctly). Talk about motivation for a good thesis at the end of my four years....

Anyway, we arrived at the museum and were each assigned to groups and paintings. We had about 20 minutes to look at our painting and take notes on what we saw, so that we would be able to explain to the best of our ability the painting to our group in detail, without making any inferences. My painting was a portrait of a woman in the Victorian Age. Sitting and looking at it, a few things were obvious: her dress, the flowers next to her, and the sheer elegance of it all. Yet, the more I looked, the more detail I saw. The flowers were not just flowers in a vase, but instead, they were certain types of flowers of different colors and different heights and the vases were made of marble and ceramic.

Describing my portrait to my group was a lot more challenging than I thought it would be as I kept saying things that were actually inferences, and then was told to back them up with more observation. For example, I could not say the table cloth was velvet, but rather that it looked heavy and the texture of the red material was painted to appear almost fuzzy. I also couldn't say that something looked "expensive", but instead I needed to say it was gold and silver and intricate-ly detailed. Though I kept getting tripped up, my observations helped me to tell the story of the woman in the painting. I then was allowed to make inferences: I suggested that she was wealthy (the elegant dress and table cloth and tapestry behind her), that she was coping with death (the flowers, her dress, her facial expression), and that it was a staged portrait (all the materials in the photo were precisely placed and so was she). My friend then chimed in and explained how he thought her hands might make her seem a little chubby (hard for me to tell in a typical victorian style dress). The docent later revealed to us that she was actually pregnant, which made his observation not ridiculously judgmental after all. We also learned that she was mourning the death of her father (likely), that she was, in fact, wealthy, that this portrait was staged (and actually so were all the props as this artist had all these in his studio when historians visited it and subjects were just told to pick out what they wanted in it), and that the room had virtually no space (the chair was right next to the table and the woman was between the table and the chair) because women during this time were kept on tight leashes or they were thought to run wild (and her space was VERY tight). We also spent a good deal of time debating and looking for clues that told us whether she was picking the flower she was holding from a vase, or putting it back in. Though I am unsure if this argument was EXACTLY solved, it was a good way to hone our skills by looking at her body language, her hand positions, and the flower itself.

Following my turn, the three other people in my group showed their paintings. Their's were much harder to describe, landscapes and seascapes instead of portraits featuring so many different people and things, but they sat and looked and described... amazingly. In one portrait we found out there was a horse in the back shadows (but we would never have seen it otherwise) and in another we debated whether people were getting on or getting off a boat and what time of day it must have been. Sometimes it is nice to just wander around a museum and look at art, but since my AP Art History class in high school, I have never taken this much time staring at one, or interpreting what it really meant.

Once all four of us had gone, we returned to a room with the rest of a class where we met with a dermatologist. This physician gave us pictures of patients and asked us to use our newly developed skills to see the differences between skin rashes, for example. It was not enough to say we saw red bumps located on the back, but it was important that they followed the spine, or that they were in different sizes in different patches, or that the bumps were star shaped.

A bump will never just be a bump.....again.