When artist Jennifer Graeber McCormick is working as a medical illustrator, she can't interpret what she sees or explore her own creativity or change a deadly diagnosis into a happy one.
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She must draw with an amazing amount of precision and recreate exactly what is there, even if it is a hard truth.
"I make the artwork that is used to explain injuries to juries," says McCormick, a former Lancastrian who now lives in North Carolina and runs her own business, Art for Law and Medicine Inc. "They have to be medically accurate, absolutely factual. I see sad stories on a daily basis."
But in her exhibit "X-ray Visions," running through Aug. 15 at the Parlor Gallery, McCormick is reinventing those sad stories.
"I want to be able to tell the emotional part of the story I can't tell a jury," she says. "I'd like to make someone well, save the girl who was hit by the drunk driver. I'd like to intervene. I take the X-rays and change the stories, reorient them."
In the exhibit, McCormick ties the scientific — the radiography that reveals the breast cancer, shows the skull fracture after the accident, confirms the clogged heart valves that led to the heart attack — with the artistic — the healing, the hopeful.
And she uses birds to convey the healing and the hope.
"There is something about how you can't control a bird," McCormick explains. "You can make a dog sit or follow instructions, but birds don't react in any predictable way. There is something uncontrollable about them. That's the way accidents happen, they are random and chaotic. That's the way pathology and disease happen. And that is the way healing happens too.
"I just love the idea that in all that chaos, there are some unexpected patterns of healing."
One piece features an x-ray of a skull fracture with a bird sitting in a nest inside the skull. On another, birds flock to a a suspicious mass in a mammogram.
"I know life is random as it presents itself," she says. "It's nice as an artist to tell a happy story. It's a joy to sit down and paint things that make people feel good, that make them smile."
McCormick graduated with a degree in art and biology from Millersville University.
She believes science and art have a lot of similarities.
"Observation is fundamental to both of them," she says. "When I look at the human figure, I am looking at what's underneath the skin — the framework, the skeleton. Scientists and artists ask themselves the same kind of questions."
After Millersville University, McCormick got accepted to the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, where she earned a graduate degree in the Department of Art as Applied to Medicine.
"They take five students a year," McCormick says. "I was counting on getting accepted. I had no plan B."
During the first year, students study cadavers and physiology.
Then students go on to learn technique. They delve into the minutia of illustration, the need to recreate textures, to explore the architecture of bones and muscles.
"You force the eye to see the nuance in 256 shades of gray," McCormick explains. "Gradations are incredibly sensitive."
She has worked in operating rooms, taking notes so she can recreate what she's seen first hand.
"The whole language of medicine has to be be accurate or nobody can learn from it," she says.
But in this exhibit, McCormick is able to let her imagination fly, to create the hopeful beauty that is often missing from her other work.
"I don't find it frivolous. I want things to be beautiful."
"X-Ray Visions"
by Jennifer McCormick
Cont. through Aug. 15
Hours by appointment. Free
Parlor, 320 Laurel St., 392-1772
www.parlorgallery.org
(702)
