Art has been central to my existence for as long as I can remember. As a boy growing up in war-torn Lebanon in the 1970s and 1980s, I spent much of my free time sketching everything from cartoon characters to original pieces dealing with the events around me. I recall that a national magazine held a drawing competition for school children in Lebanon in 1982, specifically to see how children thought of the bloody civil war they were living in. I was 8 years old at the time and ended up submitting a drawing of a young mother carrying a baby out of a burning home as attack helicopters and artillery decimated her village, and yet, despite the atrocity taking place in the foreground, in the background there was a beautiful sunrise over majestic snow-capped mountains. That drawing was published in that magazine; we had a few copies in our home but when that home was hit by artillery fire and all our belongings and memories burned to ashes in 1984, that drawing too was lost. So, you can see that from an early age art was a means of processing and expression for me.
I am the only artist in my family of engineers, physicians, and teachers; art was not prioritized in my home and certainly I was never encouraged to go into the arts. So, I limped along over the years, secretly keeping that flame alight while going through the motions at school. Don’t get me wrong, I always enjoyed learning, and I was certainly quite adept at getting top grades, and yet I often felt like I was pretending to be someone else to fit in, constantly trying to suppress my artistic side. But try as I might, as the years passed I could not stop myself from continuing to draw, paint, and sculpt.
It was during my anatomy course in medical school that I began to seriously focus on anatomic sketching and painting. It should not be a surprise then that I would be attracted to congenital cardiology with its anatomic variety, a veritable playground for someone who spends his free time sketching and is the guy doodling in the back of the class during a lecture.
By sharing select pieces from over the years I will try to take the reader on a short journey through how art helps me understand and teach anatomy, develop interventional and surgical procedures, express emotion, and unwind.
