A SURGEON’S KNIFE, A PAINTER’S BRUSH: The Intersection of Life and Art

Dec 27

How did surgery effect my painting?

For me, I think the question is, “How did my painting affect my heart surgery?” The two were so inextricably linked.

During 2022 I spent the year working on the Unified Field paintings that were inspired by an out-of-body experience I had during a concert [read about it here], Emily started to work for me just as I was preparing for three major one-person exhibitions, three studio exhibitions, and an epic level of studio cleaning and organizing of 45 years of accumulation.

We got through the summer studio exhibitions and the fall solo exhibition at the Soprafina Gallery in Boston.⁠ I took off an afternoon for my annual cardiac physician's appointment. He looked at my chart and said – “It's time.”⁠
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“What?!”⁠
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The doctor had been watching my heart for years. A heart murmur first detected when I was 17 was ready. My aortic valve needed to be replaced.⁠
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He was optimistic that I could do it laparoscopically, which entails a 45-minute operation, one night in the hospital, and about a week of home rest. I thought -- I can do that.⁠

My surgeon, after reviewing some tests, had a different diagnosis. He told me that besides the bad valve, I had an aneurysm and I needed open heart surgery.
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Our garage band: Leslie and The Cardiac Arrests.⁠

My surgery took six hours. The narcotics kept me comfortable, and the hallucinations were entertaining. At one point I imagined the pillows under my arms were jewel-encrusted, and that they were also paintings that I was working on. And they were coming out so well. (Yes, that was the drugs talking.)

One night when I was particularly wadded up in my bed, I called the nurse and asked him if he could Martha Stewart my bed. With tubes coming out of every part of my body, I was in control of very little in my surroundings. If I could just have my little spot of real estate sorted out, I would feel better. It was very late at night, and I asked the nurse if there was a place where he could take a nap. He told me that he could sleep anywhere. He used to be in the Coast Guard, and he once fell asleep while rucking out a buoy in the North Atlantic. With that, he took my sheet in both of his hands and snapped it in the air. Finally, with my bed in order, I drifted off to sleep confident that were we to enter rocky waters I had someone with serious skills to help me out.

After six days, I was able to go home. My extraordinary cousin Nancy came to take care of me. I was greeted by Christmas decorations put up by Emily and Nancy, with Tinkerbell lights everywhere.⁠
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I didn't know what had happened to me until my friends Sue and Marianne, who served as my go-betweens with the Medical staff told me. Much of what I experienced would be true for any heart patient. They removed all the blood from my body except what ran through my brain. They chilled me down to near-freezing temperatures. My heart had both enlarged and become hard, so they had to warm me up and help my heart become supple enough to join with the valve, and then cool me down again. This procedure was repeated several times, which added significantly to the length of my surgery. Then they discovered that my aorta had thinned, and it needed to be reinforced. ⁠
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Susan asked, -- Did you know that you were dead on the table? I'm thinking, well, I didn't know, but I'm here now so it's a little late to worry about it.⁠
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“Do you think it will change your painting?” She asked.⁠ Several people asked me a similar question. I think they were wondering if I saw “The Light”. Did I experience death and what was it like? Unfortunately, I have no recollection of being dead, but I can tell you that what I experienced at the concert is what I imagine death to be -- A kind of pure consciousness that is both universal and individual. That makes us part of everything and yet still conscious of ourselves. Yes, I've experienced that, but it wasn't on the operating table.⁠
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The recovery went as one would expect. But while I'm grateful to everyone for their help I could not have survived without my cousin.⁠
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I tried to get back to work right away, but I found I didn't have the mental capacity. For two weeks I couldn't hold a cohesive thought in my head. I also had frequent light flashes in my eyes, all related to the surgery.⁠

I did manage to work on one small painting. I can't describe the feeling of finally engaging with the painting. The thing that comes to mind is the foot on a sewing machine, which has to be pressed tightly against the fabric for the needle to be able to make a stitch. It's as though I had to press in on the painting mentally and perhaps even physically.

In 2023 I spent months working on small, even tiny, paintings. — Can I distill all that I know to three by four inches? Can small be as compelling as big? Can it be as significant?⁠

⁠At my last open studio, a woman told me that her daughter had died. And one night her daughter came to her and brought her to where she was. She said that everything was pixelated into little dots. That she, both had a strong sense of herself and also felt pixelated and joined with the rest of the universe. Everything she mentioned: the lack of cohesion, the sense of self and no self, the colored dots, everything she described was what I had experienced at the concert. ⁠
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Then she told me that my painting made her feel like that.⁠

For me, the experience at the concert, the surgery, and the paintings that followed were all interwoven. Knowing that we are all floating dust motes of color that cohere one day and disperse the next helped me experience the surgery as being something on that spectrum. As I lay in my bed for six days, I felt as though it was one long meditation with all my dust motes waiting to cohere again.