What does it mean for a body to be in perfect health, or its opposite? Through painting, I try to confront such questions about human illness and healing. Work like, discover, recover, cover pairs youthful images of magical thinking with the clinical, often menacing symbols of medicine. The contrast is a dynamic one, I hope. Are imaginative charms—the dandelion, the wand, the magician’s hat—so different from the scalpel or the suturing needle? Anyone with a conventional childhood can recall the image of a red balloon, while the artist must consult a surgical manual to capture a forceps on canvas. Yet both instruments are vested with a similar psychic power. Both demand our willful, wishful trust.

Technique is part and parcel of this subject matter. I use diptych and triptych panels to express, physically, both the collisions and divisions between objects. Often, a series of canvases will replicate a single item—a bone, let’s say, or a bubble—in different forms, thereby commenting on the non-linear nature of disease and recovery. Remission and relapse give illness its cyclical, insistent quality. Cancer, that most notorious of human afflictions, begins with a perversion of the body’s natural and innocent tendency to repeat itself.

The ephemeral mood of my canvases often begins, with thickly vibrant pigments. Starting with a palette of high chroma blues and whites, I then use a variety of blending and thinning methods to turn these bright shades transparent. I create cloud-like backgrounds by combining patches of color with dry brush layers. This relationship with color expresses ambivalence toward the medical experiences I depict. For a sequence of bubble paintings in my exhibition, side effect, I sketched randomly and used cross-hatching in order to “pixilate” the visual space. Combined, these effects recreate the suspended mental states we associate with illness. So-called “reality,” for the sick patient, is mediated by anesthesia, physical weakness, painkillers, or semi-consciousness—all of which create their own kind of beauty, even as they dilute the intensities of human experience.

Like Georgia O’Keeffe, whose pastel palette and cloudy backdrops managed to aestheticize emblems of death and decay, I like to estrange medical material from its usual context and situate it anew. A mound of pills becomes a field of Technicolor dreams; a microscopic detail of cells takes on the intricate visual appeal of textile design. I have also learned from Gustav Klimt’s intelligent uses of pattern, Jacopo da Pontormo’s offbeat and surreal deployment of color and Francis Bacon’s meditative—at times, aesthetically thrilling—treatment of the grotesque.

This link between illness and art is more than just a conceptual motif. Painting about illness is a tricky endeavor. Too often it becomes an aesthetic of victimhood and suffering. Such painterly rants are less satisfying to create, in my view, than images that are a little bit factual and a little bit sentimental. Impaired Function series encompass both deformity and grace, observing illness with equal measures of fascination and grief. Beyond mere rage, my work hopes to fashion a more complex human response to the question of disorder.