Health Care Fine Art

5 Tips for using this Website

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This website has grown over the last year-and-a-half. There are over 600 "posts" (short articles) on the blog. Here are five tips to help you sort through all those articles to quickly find what you are interested in:

1. Use the Search Feature
2. Look at the Table of Contents
3. Don't miss Older Posts
4. Leave and Read Comments
5. Use Hyperlinks

Search Feature

If there is a topic or person you are looking for, type it into the Search field on the upper right. For example, if you type in "Budget" dozens of references to budget on the blog appear.

Table of Contents

One problem with blogs is that they are arranged by time rather than by subject. The newest posts are always at the top. To help narrow down your search, I created a table of contents. You can find it on the upper right hand side of the page.

If you click the on the word "Interview" you will see a list of the leaders in HealthCare that I have interviewed.

Older Posts

No more than ten posts can appear on one page of this website. But older articles may have the information you are interested in. To see them, when you get to the very bottom of a page be sure to press the >> icon with an underline under it.

Leave a Comment

One way blogs are different than other websites is that they allow readers to leave comments. This can lead to some pretty interesting discussions. To read those discussions you need to click the word "comments" found at the bottom of every post.

If you have an opinion on a topic, please leave a comment. Click here to see an explanation about how to leave comments.

Use Hyperllinks

If you see underlined text, that probably means it is a "Hyperlink". If you put your cursor over the text and cick, you are taken to a website that goes into greater depth on that topic. For example in ther paragraph above this one, I added a hyperlink to the words "Click here."

Featured Artist: David Caton

Dreaming of Utopia by David Caton, oil on canvas 192" x 48" 

When I asked Kathy Hathorn to suggest an artist whose work fits with healthcare she wrote:

David Caton (Harris Gallery) would be a good one - many of his images have characteristics of a savanna landscape.

The piece illustrated above (Dreaming of Utopia) was a commissioned piece for Sacred Heart Medical Center at RiverBend, in Springfield, Oregon. That huge art project was covered on a previous post, to read it click here.

I could not find a specific website dedicated to David Caton's work. However, the Harris Gallery can provide you with more information. Their link is: www.harrisgalleryhouston.com

Kathy Hathorn is President and Principal-in-Charge of American Art Resources in Houston. Kathy is widely recognized as a pioneer and leader in the field of Evidence-based Art.

If you have someone you would like to suggest to be a featured artist for healthcare, please email me.

Why is Modern Art Flat? Part 2

Gotham News by Willem de Kooning, 1955, oil on canvas

Today I will finally get a chance to see the art exhibit "Action/Abstraction" at the St. Louis Art Museum. These abstract paintings epitomize what it means for a painting to be flat. Since experts consider both "flat" and "abstract" to be wrong for art in healthcare I thought it might be useful to explore what those terms mean and where they came from.

Richard Lacayo's recent blog post explored this: 

Greenberg took the dialectic, the idea of an historically inevitable path, and applied it to painting. He saw (and urged on!)... a final distillation of developments he identified as having been in motion since Manet. Those were chiefly the expulsion of all representational imagery and an advance towards pure flatness, the basic condition of "the picture plane", also known as the canvas. No more paintings as "pictures", as windows into a scene. From now on paintings would be arrangements of color and form on a flat surface.

This quote is from Time Magazine's blog "Looking Around" which reviewed the art exhibit "Action/Abstraction".

There is an excellent article reviewing this exhibit in the September issue of Art in America. It is called "Guardians of the Avant-Garde" and was written by Richard Kalina.

The question "Why is Modern Art Flat?" was also covered on a post in the summer of 2007. To read it, click here.

Voting in the Middle-of-Nowhere

My 85-year old mother Joan voting in the Dixie Christian Church basement today.

I live in the middle-of-nowhere; our house is located off-a-gravel-road which itself is off-a-gravel-road. There are a lot of disadvantages to living in a remote rural area:

• No good restaurants
• No art museums or galleries
• No theater
• No live music

But there are a couple of advantages. One is that voting is fast, easy and pleasant. There was no line when I showed up to vote today; just four friendly volunteers to help me. They all knew my name; no one asked for identification.

Another advantage of living here is that nature can be right at your backyard. I don't have to travel anywhere to take my nature pictures, I can just walk out the door.

I wouldn't move if you paid me!

Lighting is Everything !

What a difference proper lighting makes!

To properly display art in a hospital, the first thing to ask is "What lighting will the picture have?"

This point was made crystal clear to me the first time I exhibited in a gallery with a quarter-million dollar lighting system. I was stunned by how much better my pictures looked; better than I had ever seen them. It was as if they were properly dressed for the first time. The pictures just seemed to pop; better contrast, better color, better presence.

But you don't have to use such a fancy computer-operated system. Just a few inexpensive spot lights can make all the difference, as the picture above demonstrates. This is a recent installation in Virginia with one of my canvas prints (Lotus-Back 7558). 

This picture was taken with Norm Brinkman's iPhone.

Art in Italian Hospitals: Part 2

A hallway in Santa Maria Nuova Hospital in Florence before and after Elaine Poggi's photos were hung

Elaine Poggi continues her investigative reporting on the art scene in Italian Hospitals:

The following are my thoughts on the old public hospitals in Italy.  I’ll write another article on our new public hospitals later…
 
Many of the public hospitals in Italy date back hundreds of years.  The oldest hospital in Europe is Santa Maria Nuova, just a few blocks from my office in Florence.  Parts of this hospital date back to the late 1200s.  Thus, it is easy to imagine that the structures of the facilities may not be in great shape.  Most if not all of these old hospitals do not have funding for art in their budgets because funding is poured into the maintenance of the structures. 
 
When I enter these hospitals, sometimes it is difficult for me to breath because of the depressing atmosphere, the dirty and bare walls, the uncomfortable and mismatched furniture, the patients waiting for hours in tiny waiting rooms.  It is just awful…
 
Fortunately in the last few years there are signs of improvement.  Sometimes the doctors or nurses at their own expense will put up posters or photographs on the walls of their area.  Through The Foundation for Photo/Art in Hospitals, I have donated hundreds of nature photos to many hospitals all over Italy to add some color.  I would say that the need for art to brighten these old facilities is urgent.

To read "Art in Italian Hospitals: Part 1"  which dealt with art at Private Hospitals, click here.

Elaine Poggi was born in America but has lived in Italy for decades. She founded and heads the The Foundation for Photo/Art in Hospitals a non-profit publicly supported organization dedicated to placing comforting nature art in hospital world-wide. She is also a fine photographer and frequent contributor to this blog.

End of the Season

Flowering Dogwood - Full Fall Color

This week marks the end of the growing season. We had our first killing frost.

There continues to be splashes of vibrant color in the woods; the dogwood trees have been particularly good. We have thousands of them here at the Prairie Garden Trust.

This week Bill Frank brought out his big yellow combine to harvest 20-acres of soybeans. We are getting ready to plant them back into native prairie plants. More subjects to photograph.

Last week we had a managed burn on the 43-acres north of our house. We have to burn our prairies about every three years to keep them vigorous.

This week also is the end of the season for the Presidential election. I'm ready for it to end! I'm spending way too much time reading the blogs and checking the polls.

Featured Artist: JR Griffin

Untitled by JR Griffin.

Faye Urlacher is an art consultant who owns artstudio 1.0.1 in Scottsdale Arizona. She suggested that I have JR Griffin as a featured artist. She wrote: 

He does work on paper and mixed-media on wood. I think his art is so appropriate for health care in the way that it is very gentle in coloration and mimics plant life in a very abstract form.  He will at times actually insert etchings into the work for a very complimentary effect.

I think this type of art is cohesive with photography, such as yours, as it evokes that calmness that we are looking for in a healing environment.

Even though he was born in Chicago, JR has lived in Phoenix since 1976. More of his work can be seen on his website: www.jrgriffinart.com

If you have someone you would like to suggest to be a featured artist, please email me.

Challenging Art Project: Cedars Sinai Medical Center

Art at the Cancer Center Expansion at Cedars Sinai Medical Center, Los Angeles, CA

One of the winners in the contest for the "most challenging art project" was Angela Ahrens. This is the text that Angela submitted: 

The 3,000-square-foot infusion unit is located in the lower level of Cedars Sinai Medical Center, where 14 infusion bays surround a centralized nursing area. The primary source of daylight streams in from a narrow row of skylights on the East side of the space, which stretches to 42 feet high from the general ceiling heights of 12 to 25 feet.

The design details capitalize on this light source by offering patients pleasing views during their four- to six-hour treatment. The design team created large backlit panels installed in the upper region of the east and west walls to visually suggest light filtering even further down into the space. Approximately eight feet tall and four feet wide, the panels depict colorful images found in nature, selected to represent a sense of life, living, and looking into the future.

The lighting subtly replicates the natural change in daylight throughout the day. Synchronized to four-hour cycles that reflect daylight’s color gradations, the light subtly shifts from rosy red in the morning to white at noon and eventually lavender at sunset. Softly back-lit instead of being lit from the front, the panels project a 3-dimensional glow that enhances the environment for patients, as well as family members and staff. If a patient falls asleep for an hour, he will wake to images that look and feel different based on the color changes, strengthening the sense of passing time in the windowless space infused with natural and controlled light.

Angela Ahrens is an Interior Designer with HGA Architects and Engineers. She is based in Minneapolis, MN. She has received a brand new copy of HealthCare Spaces 4

We are a Featured Blog on TypePad!

I am proud to say that Henry Domke Fine Art is a "featured blog" with TypePad this week.
Click here to see their featured blogs.

TypePad is the largest paid blogging service in the world. I have used TypePad for this blog since I started in early 2007.

I have to say I have been very happy working with them. They have templates which are easy to use and look professional. I never have to worry about coding (good thing, since I don't understand programming).

My two favorite blogs also use TypePad:

• Seth Godin's Blog
  
• Steve May's Blog
  

To learn more about TypePad, their website is: www.typepad.com