Health Care Fine Art

Essential New Book on Evidence-based Design

I've just finished reading Jain Malkin's new book: A Visual Reference for Evidence-Based Design.

This is a significant book that should be on the desk of everyone involved with HealthCare design.

It describes in clear language how and why you should use Evidence-based Design. Malkin digs in deep and presents the research behind Evidence-based Design (EBD).  Thankfully, she does this in a practical, non-threatening way. This is not a dry academic text but rather a useful handbook, a reference you will want to use frequently when working on projects.

Even more important, since Design is a visual process, the book is filled with hundreds of large full-color pictures that illustrate what she is writing about. These are not just pretty pictures; they frequently have lines drawn to point out key design features.

Summary:

• Outstanding. A "Must Buy"
• The most important book available on Evidence-based Design.

Pros:

• Clear, practical writing
• Visually rich

Cons:

• Not much about the use of Art in Healthcare (only two pages!)
• Expensive ($200)

Minor issues:
I found the way that the  illustrations were clustered after each chapter to be confusing. Why not put them in the body of the text?

I disagree with her emphasis on infection control. Not that it is not important, but I think she over-emphasizes it. In her interview she says: "Infection control is such a big issue today; it has to be the No. 1 thing that architects and designers understand."

Why isn't this book available on Amazon.com? The only way to purchase it now is through the Center for Health Design: click here

The May/June 2008 HC&O News just arrived with a splashy front cover featuring the book. They also have an interview with Jain about the book which you can read by clicking here

Featured Artist: Joanie San Chirico

Marshlands Triptych by Joanie San Chirico, each 42"x42" pigment, paint, hand stitching on linen and framed.

Joanie San Chirico's work is unique in that it incorporates photography, paint, stitching and textiles in such a way that the viewer is challenged to decipher the actual composition of the painting. Her Environmental Series combines these mediums to portray natural surfaces using imagery of the planet's fragile beauty.

In my travels I photograph fragments of lichen, rocks, dead vines and trees, and I never know when I'll find an interesting image or texture that I'll save for later use. This work is about raising awareness about the fragility of our environment. The exhibit depicts a balance of art and nature; portraits of our vanishing landscape.

Joanie is a Massachusetts native, but currently resides in New Jersey. She is also a cancer survivor:

...that is why I'm interested in putting my work in hospitals and healing places because I'm convinced that my work got me through the hard times after my surgery and subsequent chemo.

More of her work can be seen at her website: www.joaniesanchirico.com

Marshlands Triptych (illustrated above) will be installed at the AtlantiCare Regional Medical Center, Atlantic City, NJ. The selection of the art was through through Aesthetics, Inc.

Bargain Paintings from China

Oil paintings are usually too expensive to fit into the budget of a new hospital. It helps if you have a donor who would give one from their collection.  Now there is another way to have real oil paintings: have them made in China.

To learn in more detail how this works I interviewed Wujie Li. He owns The Oil Painting Studio.

Tell me a little bit about how The Oil Painting Stuido got  started. When did it form? How many people work there? How many  artists? What city is it in?

The website was founded in 2001, but we started the oil paintings business before that. First I was working for a biggest gallery of the Netherlands as an oil painter. Since I was working harder than the other Chinese, after one year, the gallery give me all of the order in china. But, I can not do them all by myself. I had to create the studio to do the business. I found more good artists and trained them to fit the orders request. Now there are 22 artists in the studio. We locate middle of China in Jiaozuo.

If an art consultant in the USA wanted to have a particular  painting made, could they send you a reproduction of the painting that  you or one of the other artists there could use as a template?

Yes, this is our work every day. the clients can send us the picture or image by email. We do the paintings according as clients request.

How does payment work? If an art consultant wanted to have you make  10 paintings, do they have to give you a down payment? Do you take  credit cards?

Usually if the client place a order,the client needs to send 50% money first, then we start the painting. when the painting is finished we will send the client an image for check. if the client like it,the client can put rest payment. if no do not need. but we need the rest money so we will changed and change to let the client to like it. we accept paymeny by paypal, wire and western Union.

How is the art shipped? Can you use FedEx?

We use FEDEX ,DHL and UPS.

I would assume that one of the reasons someone in America would go to the trouble of working with you is that your prices are much  better. Can you give me examples of prices?

 the price we service for artists below:
12"*16"=$160USD
16"*20"=$200
20"*24"=$240
20"*30"=$300
24"*30"=$340
24"*36"=$360
30"*40"=$420
36"*48"=$480
It is no including ship cost and frame cost. the quality is top realistic painting.

Is there anything else you would like to say?

I just want to say i do the business more than 12 years, and I am a boss and also an artist. So i know what's the service does the gallery need and what's the painting business the market of US need. Also i have others clients in US. for examples one of them a business man, he like horse, so he order more horse paintings for more horse show, to get more order form horse owners. ....very interesting.....

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I've put up two previous posts about art from China:

Save Money on Art: Outsource to China

Chinese Aim High with Fine Art Copies

For more information about oil paintings from China, contact:
Mr. Wujie Li , Principal
The Oil Painting Studio
www.oilpaintingstudio.com
P.O. Box ART-108,Qunyingxin Village,
Shanyang District, Jiaozuo, Henan Province, China 454150

Contemporary Stained Glass

Gerhard Richter's Cologne Cathedral

I've seen a variety of stained glass windows used as art in hospitals; usually in the chapels. But I've never seen anything as visually exciting as new glass art created by Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke for European Cathedrals. Peter Schjeldahl reviewed the work in the May 12th New Yorker.

When directly sunlit, Richter’s south-facing window admits a wash of aureate illumination into the cathedral’s gloomy immensity; at other times, it glows or shimmers. It is beautiful, grand, and entrancing, with the exfoliating specificities of a Bach fugue. Sixty-five feet tall, it consists of eleven thousand five hundred panes of “antique” handblown glass...

As I've mentioned on this blog before, Richter is my favorite living artist and Polke is not far behind.

Peter Schjeldahl has been my favorite art critic for over a decade. He has been the head art critic at the New Yorker since 1998.

To read the New Yorker article MANY-COLORED GLASS Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke do windows by Peter Schjeldahl click here

To see a slide show of their work click here.

How Music Heals

Dr. Claudius Conrad studies how music eases pain

Does music heal? If so, how?

The New York Times explored this in an article (A Musician Who Performs With a Scalpel by David Dobbs) on May 20th: click here.

The article explores the work that Dr. Claudius Conrad is doing on the impact of music on healing:

But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.

Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that. He recently published a provocative paper suggesting that music may exert healing and sedative effects partly through a paradoxical stimulation of a growth hormone generally associated with stress rather than healing.

Dr. Conrad is a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School. His own interest in music lead to an earlier dissertation which examined why and how Mozart’s music seemed to ease the pain of intensive-care patients.

Thanks to Kim Reiss for sending me the link to this article.

Protecting Art in Hospitals

Henry in his new spray room applying varnish to canvas prints

Canvas prints can be very effective in hospital settings. They have several advantages:

• No glass
• No glare
• Lower framing costs
• They can go very big

However, I am frequently asked: How do canvas prints hold up in a busy hospital environment? What happens when the cleaning staff wipes them with a wet cloth? How will canvas prints tolerate children with peanut butter and jelly on their fingers touching them?

The answer is: if they have a protective coating applied, they should do just fine. Over the last several years I have sold hundreds of canvas prints and they have held up fine. But I'm always looking for ways to improve things.

One problem with the protective coating I had been using is that it had to be applied after the canvas was stretched, otherwise it would crack. That meant passing on that job to the frame shops. Now I have discovered a coating that can be applied by me before I ship the prints, before the prints are stretched.

I've testing this varnish and it is amazingly tough; almost bulletproof. I've tested my prints by scrubbing them with soapy rags and by trying to scratch them with a kitchen fork. The prints came through just fine.

However, to apply the spray I had to build a spray room. A spray room is a sealed room with a strong exhaust fan and good lights. The picture above is me in the spray room today.

Interview with Annette Ridenour

Annette Ridenour is one of the top leaders in the use of Art in HealthCare.  She is also one of the founders and leaders of the Society for Arts in Healthcare (SAH). She was on the board of SAH since the beginning and served as its president for two terms.  I wanted to get her impression of the their annual conference this year.

What was your overall impression of the SAH conference in Philadelphia this year?

I believe that SAH should be spending more time on the visual arts and less time on performance arts. With the huge construction boom in healthcare there is a tremendous need for high quality visual arts programs.

Was there anything that caught your eye at the conference?

There was a fascinating art making program for children from Robert Rothschild and Jay at  the University of Florida at Gainesville [www.ArtThread.org]. It makes it easy for hospitalized kids over the age of three to create images on screen. These images can they be displayed on their screen, shared with others or put in virtual galleries online.

SeeWall Studos [www.SEEWALLSTUDIOS.COM] had a great booth and a fascinating product that we are going to start to use. Seewal Studios merges art and technology in a multimedia display of color, sound, for, light and motion. Brilliant seacapes invite cildren and families into a multimedia exploration.

Last, but not least is the Blair Sadler Awards. The five winners this year had some incredible projects. For example, one showed how music therapy in a burn unit could reduce pain substantially. Another showed how dance could get pregnant women in the ghetto to be more involved with prenatal care and to have improved outcomes. More information about this years and former years winners and how to apply for 2009 can be found on the SAH website.   

Tell me a little about your upcoming book about art in HealthCare, who is your intended audience?

We intend this to be used by hospital leadership, artists and the public. For hospital leadership we (she is writing with Blair Sadler) will explain the business case for art. For artists we want to show them the possibilities, to help them see what is needed. Lastly, we want to explain to the general public how important the arts can be in healthcare.

Annette now runs one of the largest companies involved with Art in HealthCare: Aesthetics Inc [www.aesthetics.net]. In addition to finishing her book on the use of Art in HealthCare she is deeply involved in the Blair Sadler awards.

Featured Artist: David Muench

The cover of David Muench's newest book: Arizona

The Arizona landscape has long appealed to me; perhaps because it stands in such contrast to the lush green landscapes I am normally immersed in. After a while, green becomes monotonous.

One of the masters of the Arizona Landscape is David Muench. If you are looking for Arizona Landscapes for your hospital, you should see his work. You can do that in the book "Arizona" or at his website: www.muenchphotography.com

The June 2008 issue of Outdoor Photographer magazine has a cover story on Muench. To read the story: click here.

Another Arizona photographer covered on a previous post was Alain Briot: click here.

Finally: A cool looking hospital

Woven steel panels encasing the boiler house at Guy’s Hospital in London by Thomas Heatherwick.

Hospitals are rarely exciting to look at. That was the idea behind the post: Why No Cool Looking Hospitals on this blog last summer.

I have finally discovered a hospital that does look cool, at least on the outside. This week's New Yorker had one of their architectural reviews cover a renovation of Guy's Hospital that would have to be called cool. The article, written by Paul Goldberger describes how Thomas Heatherwick approached this project:

...he started “thinking about what it would be like to be an old lady who is ill and being driven to the hospital by her grandson.” This led him to reorganize the flow of traffic at the hospital’s entrance, move a parking area, change the lighting and signage, and, finally, to wrap part of the hospital’s exterior with huge, undulating panels of woven, stainless-steel braid, giving the building a surface of rolling chain-mail bulges. Heatherwick didn’t see fixing the traffic as the practical side of the job and decorating the façade as the aesthetic part. For him, getting the grandmother closer to the front door and making her eyes light up as she saw the kinetic façade were part of the same process.

Heatherwick is not an architect, but rather a designer with a wide range of expertise. His website says he is recognized for his work in:

• architecture
• sculpture
• urban infrastructure
• product design
• exhibition design
• strategic thinking

The New Yorker article: click here
DeZeen post with more pictures: click here
Wikipedia article on Thomas Heatherwick: click here

The website for Healtherwick Studios is www.heatherwick.com

Featured Artist: Gregory Crewdson

Brief Encounter by Gregory Crewdson

I just finished another book by Gregory Crewdson: Beneath the Roses.

His dark mysterious photographs are a delight to contemplate. Certainly they would not be well accepted in a hospital setting, but in a collector's home these 4 x 5-foot prints would be stunning.

Many of the images are like the one shown above, often shot just past sunset in small towns. He uses very careful  lighting with multiple light sources: street lights, shop windows, headlights and faint illumination from the gloaming.

Like Jeff Wall he uses actors and elaborate sets to create the scenes he photographs. In the back of the book he has credits, just like in a movie, of the production crew and actors he works with. He often uses 50 or 60 people to help with each image!

I can't imagine working with a crew like that, it would drive me crazy. However, I have been toying with the idea of using actors in my landscapes. This idea came to me when I was reading about the history of landscape painting last year. Historically, landscape paintings almost always showed people. Landscape photographs typically do not show people; but they could...