Sarah Faris has been creating art since middle school in Chesterfield, Virginia and knew that one day she wanted to be able to follow two of her passions - art and anatomy.
As a junior in high school, one of her teachers mentioned a summer program at #VCU for medical illustration hosted by a professor and two local medical illustrators. She applied, got into the program and fell in love with it immediately.
The summer program taught her what she would be learning as a potential medical illustrator and what kind of problem solving she would be doing. It also exposed her to body parts and cadavers that she had never seen before. “It was in that class where I really came to respect and understand the biological machinery of the body. That’s just been my fascination ever since.”
Faris did her undergraduate work at VCU for five years where she took both art and science classes such as anatomy and bio chemistry. After VCU she did two years at Johns Hopkins where she received a Master of arts in medical and biological #illustration.
During her time in graduate school, she faced her first form of criticism amongst her classmates who were studying to become doctors. In her gross anatomy class, one student asked her why she was there because she’s only an art student. “I picked up the book we were looking at and said, ‘These drawings, what you’re learning from, this can shape the way that you understand science and medicine and anatomy.’” Because Faris’s career would be teaching other students how to learn, she needed to know the information just as well as a doctor.
Just because someone is an artist doesn’t discredit what they learn and how smart they are. Faris is a certified medical illustrator and assistant professor at VCU and she proves that you can be creative and smart.
Bridging the medical field through digital and fine art is crucial to the way the medicine is learned, taught and used. Doctors and students rely on software programs and books to better their medical practices. The graphics artists create facilitate better learning through visualization. Students can learn more about the makeup of a cell, doctors can show patients how a surgery they will receive will go and medical companies can portray how their products will work.
Digital art has been on of the major bridges between the arts and medical fields. It’s a way to instruct students on how to learn medical procedures and inform them of what different materials and parts of the body look like.
Faris produces charts, graphs, infographics, page layouts and more. “The visual communications part of it is more important than whether or not I can draw. As a #medical #artist I think other people who are in graphics and illustration understand that inherently because they do similar things in their jobs.”
Some people associate an artist with just being creative and right-brained and don’t really believe that some people can be both.
“According to the left-brain, right-brain dominance theory, the right side of the brain is best at expressive and creative tasks,” said Kendra Cherry in an online article on the website Very Well Mind. She is the author of Everything Psychology Book and is a psychological rehabilitation specialist. Very Well Mind is an online website that provides help, information and guidance from psychologists and therapists on different medical conditions and how to have a healthy mentality.
Cherry analyzed different studies to disprove this theory. “It’s absolutely true that some brain functions occur in one or the other side of the brain. Language tends to be on the left, attention more on the right. But people don’t tend to have a stronger left- or right-sided brain network. It seems to be determined more connection by connection," explained the study's lead author Dr. Jeff Anderson. Dr. Anderson works in the interdepartmental program in Neuroscience, the department of bioengineering and radiology as well as the brain institute at the University of Utah.
Faris is just one of the many artists that is helping to bridge the art and medical fields. Ruthie Clements, a freshman in the VCU painting and printmaking department, has found her focus in medical illustrations as well. Sitting around her artistic friends in 8th grade, she knew she wanted to make art like them. Her parents are both in the NCIS and has had a passion for criminal work for as long as she can remember.
“My parents have always been really practical so when I decided I wanted to do art as a career, it was something I had to be practical about too.” Because of this, she decided to mesh both crime and art together to pursue as a career in fine art.
Clements recently produced four charcoal drawings of the murder of #AnnieTahan. Tahan was a new mother who disappeared in 1989 in Charleston, South Carolina. After four years without a trace, local authorities contacted the NCIS for help. After investigation, they found her remains and convicted #MichaelPaalan and #DawnBreeze for murder. The NCIS stands for Naval Criminal Investigative Service and they are based out of Washington, D.C.
Clements’s work included one x-ray, a facial composite based on skull reconstruction, a portrait of Annie Tahan and a side-by-side portrait of her two convicted murderers. These drawings have received a lot of positive feedback from her peers as well as individuals that work with her parents in the NCIS.
The NCIS plans on using Clement’s drawings in an educational seminar for #forensic students to learn about the murder and how art can help investigators.
Forensic students learn about how to solve murders, what evidence to look for and how to analyze the evidence they have. One forensic science student at VCU, Pree Parikh, agrees that art can be crucial for investigations. She’s learned that some of the DNA evidence on a crime scene may be affected if a flash photo of it is taken.
“If you can get an artist to detail out the evidence, then you don’t need to take a picture of it,” said Parikh. “It’s really important, especially in murder cases when you need to bring in pictures of the evidence.” Sketch artists also play a big role in investigations. They can provide images of potential suspects without even knowing who they are yet.
Faris’s work also includes portraying medical devices for big companies. Those companies often think they don’t need medical illustration. “That engineering is going to go into someone’s body and understanding how information can connect is important for a story. Understanding complexity and where it can live and where it shouldn’t. That comes with understanding what problems are my clients trying to solve. What are they trying to achieve?”
Parikh says that illustrations like the ones Faris produces help her learn on a daily basis.
“When we get new softwares on heart transplants or things inside of the body that we can’t do, those machines and graphics are really intricate and detailed so you don’t need to cut open a body or take a CT scan and know what it is. People have created real time and hands-on illustrations that can help us.”
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