v.autumn.ii

Painting Amanda Murphy
By Aaron Crosby, M3

Jackson Pollock once said that "every good artist paints what he is." Amanda Murphy, featured this month in The Body Electric for her outstanding contributions to TBE the last two years, is no exception. Amanda was kind enough to answer a few questions for TBE regarding her painting, her path to medicine, and the interplay between the two.

Two Roses - Amanda Murphy (Oil on canvas) 

I had the pleasure of meeting Amanda for the first time when serendipity had us working in the same emergency room - I on my core Emergency Medicine clerkship, and Amanda on her 2nd year introduction to Acute Care clerkship.  I remember seeing her leaning against a counter in her crisp, white student jacket. She was reading from a large red text, looking every bit the part of student doctor as she squeezed in a little extra EKG practice prior to her first block of exams. I glimpsed her name on the shiny little placards we are all issued by the medical school. I exclaimed, "You paint, don't you?"

Owed to the lab rat - Amanda Murphy (Pen and Marker)

And indeed she does. Very well. Her works seamlessly blend the beautiful with the technical. Her pieces share a dreamlike quality with the work of some her favorite masters, like Jackson Pollock, Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Degas and Claude Monet. Amanda's images draw on a wide range of themes - from her take on classic still-life pieces to interpretations of abstract medical concepts. 

It should come as no surprise that the thrill of creation caught her early on in life. "My interests in the arts were sparked at a young age by my uncle, who is an architect/designer in Santa Monica, CA." This is not to say she always knew she wanted to be a painter. In fact, she had a veritable potpourri of interests and passions growing up. "I actually envisioned myself in countless professions ranging from political cartoonist or freelance writer, to international/humanitarian lawyer." 

There was one thing that was a constant during her education - she would not back down from a challenge. "I recall an instance during my sophomore year of high school when my English teacher asked the class, 'How many of you honestly believe that you will go to medical school?' My arm shot up into the air pretty quickly." So even if she had many different visions for her life, "maybe subconsciously I always knew that I wanted to become a physician."

Represent your city - Amanda Murphy (Pen and Marker)

While Amanda has chosen a career as a physician, there is no denying that she remains as much of an artist as ever. When she is working on a piece, she is 100% focused. "I usually dedicate my undivided attention to a painting, so I prefer to paint alone. I paint in my apartment while listening to the radio or iTunes." For her, finding the time to create is not a challenge once she is invested in a project. "If I get really into a piece, I will stay up all night," she tells me, "even spend an entire weekend working non-stop."

Most medical students find the work of building themselves into competent doctors to be challenging enough, even without the added task of spending extra time and emotional energy on a passion as consuming as art is for Amanda, but Amanda doesn't see her art as a burden - in fact, she views it as being quite the opposite. "Painting is a great outlet for me," she says. She feels both medicine and art have bettered her, as she has grown to have a "greater appreciation for the gift of as well as the mystery of life." She does acknowledge that medicine has changed her art somewhat by making it more intellectual, a change most apparent in my personal favorite of her drawings, the surreal Posterior MI. "The biggest change in my art that I have noticed is in my drawings, she says, "My main audience now is comprised of other medical students, therefore I feel that I can express complex ideas . . . that can be appreciated by my peers."

Posterior MI - Amanda Murphy

The Body Electric thanks Amanda Murphy as she paints and draws what she is - physician-in-training, artist.

v.autumn.end

Auf Wiedersehen! Thank you for reading.

ii.2

NEW GLASS

BY ANONYMOUS

I remember asking my mom that night “can’t we call someone and tell them to make it stop? How about the President or the Pope?”

I was eleven years old and I had just felt the earth shudder and watched the hills explode in flames as bombs were dropped on my country. I call it“mine” because once someone tries to destroy something dear to you, you can’t help but call it your own and try to tug it back from their reach. But when has land ever belonged to any person?

The sound of bombs dropping kept me up all night and my stomach was tied in knots as I curled up between my parents on the floor. The question I posed to my mom remains with me till this day because I spent that sleepless night mulling it over. Over and over I thought about who I wanted to call and yell at – who I wanted to call and cry to and beg to and plead to make it stop - and continuously I came up blank.

My gut instinct till that point had always been to reach for my parents when I felt threatened but there they were, beside me on the floor; and tremors rippled through that floor all night long.

That night I was confronted with forces that I didn’t know existed and didn’t know how to resolve. They were dark and beyond my understanding but would forever change the way I saw the world and would ultimately shape the way I understood the concept of justice. But what’s an eleven year old to do with justice?

I kept my eyes open all night but my nightmare was reality.

As dawn broke I woke with my mom and walked with her towards the living room in silence. She grabbed a broom and started sweeping. As the light of a new day forced its way between the clouds, she answered my question before I had to ask: “we can’t put it back together, but we can buy new glass.”

ii.3

ARM WRESTLING
BY ANONYMOUS

“Watch him. Watch how he pulls his arm closer and leans in so he can win.”

He taught us to arm wrestle early. He taught us that the secret was in not the size of the muscles or our stamina; it was technique. Even when we were 10, we all had a hand at trying to beat my grandfather at arm wrestling. When my two cousins, Andy and Henry, were 18, they finally beat my 70 year old grandfather. At that point, he retired from the business of teaching us the art of arm wrestling and it then became our responsibility to share the secret with our younger cousins.

Arm wrestling was among one of the many skills he taught us. It wasn’t until we were older that our parents told us he also knew the secret to growing, roasting, and making coffee, but that was before he came to the United States. That was before any of us had been born.

When he was young, communism in China had forced him to escape to Vietnam and work from the ground up to re-establish himself. Several years later he married my grandmother and had six children. He taught himself how to grow and roast coffee beans and created a successful business selling coffee in Vietnam. Not many years later, communists in Vietnam took away his home and business forcing him to once again leave everything behind and escape to the United States in hopes of a better and safer future for his family.

This time, he was already in his late 40s and was tired of trying. Twice now, he had lost everything he had worked for. For the rest of his life, he spent his time watching the children and grandchildren as they grew. Even though he never shared his secret for making coffee with us, he taught us that hard-work could get us anywhere we wanted to go in life.

He had had two heart bypass surgeries and I knew when I left for medical school I did not have much time with him left. On my last visit, I told him “I’m not coming home for two more months Grandpa.” And everything in me wanted to scream, I’m afraid I won’t see you again.

“Two months passes quickly. Don’t worry.” I know and that’s why I’m scared. I’m not ready for you to go. There is so much we haven’t talked about.

“Just study hard,” he said. And in the silence that followed, I knew he understood that I was saying good-bye.

One month later, he passed away in the comfort of his own home with all of his children by his side. Every part of me says I wish I had one more minute with him, but I know we have said our goodbyes. I miss you Grandpa and I’m scared of all time that I have to sacrifice with my family to become a doctor.

ii.5

THE SEMICOLON

BY AARON CROSBY

So I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about my education recently, and I think every experience I’ve ever had was just an iteration of high school English, and if I had to be even more specific and pick one single lesson, one shining gem of dogmatism that so perfectly encapsulates every scrap of information I’ve ever forcibly shoved into my brain it would be the day that How To Use a Semicolon wafted through hormone laden clouds to lodge between my ears, for as a good student I began to incorporate it into my writing; closely related phrases were juxtaposed without the thought-wall that is the period intervening; in fact, I liked to use semicolons most with transitions and adverbs, although sometimes I liked to use it for really long lists of nouns, verbs or adjectives; or, more commonly, for ones containing lots of commas which would be confusing without my new friend, the semicolon; however, the faster I began to hand in papers containing semicolons, the faster they came back covered in red circles with admonitions like “use a period” scrawled in the margins, and as I grew increasingly frustrated, I began to realize that sometimes we are taught things so that we may be taught we are wrong, and that even though to one teacher it may be grammatically correct to begin a sentence with a conjunction and to use a semicolon in your writing, there’s some expert, somewhere who thinks it is an affront to the English language, and that sometimes, when you decide to flex your muscles and are fed up with authority’s opinion of absolute right and absolute wrong, it is necessary to break all sorts of other people’s rules in the course of writing a 300 word essay consisting of a single sentence.