Business of LifeWhile looking for something to illustrate the last post, I came across this beautiful image of a lotus and a far more powerful rule of life, Paint Our Days with Colors, Fill Our Lives with Beauty. Actually, there were two and I couldn't decide between youth and experience.
I wanted to give credit to the artist, now I want to tell his story. From Earth to Sky is a gallery featuring the watercolor works of Zen (aka C-C) Chuang who's not only an artist but a physician as well. His motto( a too small a word, and I'll be damned before I call it a mission statement, maybe it's a banner or a gonfalon) is Paint Our Days with Colors, Fill Our Lives with Beauty.
Born in Taiwan where he began painting watercolors, by way of Argentina where he spent his teens before making the US his home, Zen graduated from Brown with a degree in biochemistry and studio art and then, a medical degree from Yale School of Medicine. While in medical school he wrote and illustrated a children's book Gee-Chi about a little bird who finally finds his voice and a friend. Take the time to leaf through Gee-Chi on his website (that Zen created and manages). It hasn't been published because he's not certain the story is just right yet.
A profile in January's ArtBusiness News reveals that he takes his easel and brushes wherever he goes and he has gone through much of the United States, treating people in medically underserved areas "from the Painted Desert of Arizona to the arctic tundra in Alaska; from the foothills of the Maine mountains to the countryside in the Carolinas."
He begins his morning with a brush in hand, painting as meditation what he calls the "coins in life" - the visual delights he can share through the wonder of his watercolors. He paints the "essence" of peaches, of an autumn leaf, of a butterfly, approaching more closely the nature of things. Clearly his study of biochemistry informs his art. He's quoted in the profile, "What’s underneath a brilliant leaf shining in the sun are billions of cells operating on the microscopic level."
Then it's off to a busy, solo family practice in Taunton, Mass, treating newborns, the dying and everyone in between. It's the human condition up close and Chuang relishes his opportunity to "watch the life cycle every day."
Another feature in Yale Medicine captures his sensibility, "He tries to see each day as a gift. “There is so much adversity. … But most of us go through daily life without any big problems. That in itself is a miracle. That’s something we take for granted, like the air.”
Rounding out his day may be the course he teaches to first year medical students at Brown, "Art and Medicine," designed to enhance their observation skills and encouraging them to become more creative and humanistic doctors.
He's living an integral life and now he's putting all in one place - a colonial house with offices on the first floor, a studio upstairs, a gallery in the garage, and a healing garden where this spring it blooms with thousands of bulbs planted by Brown University students, part of the web of relationships that support his life.
Doesn't he look like a happy man? He really understands the Business of Life.
