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I had left the ivory tower of the art
department which became chaos during the Vietnam war to be with a more disciplined group
of students. When I had been at my Father’s 75th birthday party in New Orleans, at
the Rex Room at Antoine’s restaurant with all of my childhood family and my whole
life history was in front of me, I had asked myself, "What would I like to do now
that my husband had recovered from a grave illness and the children were back to
momentum?" And I quietly said, "Study anatomy." The steel engravings from
his anatomy books that I used to study behind his reading chair. I was allowed to attend
lectures and after the Chairman saw my first color etchings of "The Sagittal
Series"the progressive cuts into the human head encased in clear plastic bookends, he
invited me to the dissections. I focused on the learning process, by which they visually
put together the images from their cadaver, everybody else’s cadaver, their text
book, and schematic drawings in their dissection manuals, into one image in their brains.
Then, because of insights that I shared with the faculty, I was invited to join this
particularly bright class all the way through medical school. I was told that I noticed
things which were there, obvious to me, but they did not "see them". My work
resulted in an art book with legends documenting the metamorphesis of first year graduate
students into highly disciplined physicians. When the Dean offered me this unique
opportunity to really belong to the inside of this medical center, I knew that I probably
would do some ordinary life drawings, but I would grow with the students and in the doing,
make some art works. I felt like Redon with his dancers around the large anatomy
laboratory, but there was a difference. These figures were at very meaningful tasks, the
life and the death, the sick and the well, the emergency of trust beetween two people, the
mentorship of the professor and his residents, so that they become as he is. Because I
was allowed to be in this out of limits for a layprson, a forbidden environment, other
imagery, out of this world, too, came forward within my memory. Experiences dredged up
like a claw machine had clamped them, long buried memories and they surfaced in my dreams.
True, I had kept a journal of dreams since I first married and had made some etchings from
the Old Testament and some of the themes of the New Testament. But now I began painting
them. Following the same young doctors into their residency at the large charity hospital,
made even more poignant dreams come to be. For by now, I had absorbed a great deal of
trauma from the anger, fear and pain of the patients and the frustrations and anxieties of
the physicians and students.
It was like an oil gusher to a layer of memories of similar times in my life, From
there flowed up with great force, dream images and sometimes dream movies, into another
space in my mind. I could deal with them now. |
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Contents: The Art of May Lesser | An Artist Looks
at Dreams Preface
Preface page 1 - "I feel
like I am being a traitor to..."
Preface page 2 - "I had left the
ivory tower of the art..."
Preface page 3 - "Out of our
private gropings and self..."
Preface page 4 - "In a dream, if
there is a child held..."
Preface page 5 - "There
is much in science that is..."
Preface page 6 - "The
symbolic use of animals in..."
Preface page 7 - "With
the medical series, I served as..."
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