What Cy Twombly's Art Can Teach Us About Patients' Stories

Abstract

Some patients' stories can be hard to tell and hard to listen to, especially in pressured, time-pinched clinical environments. This difficulty, however, doesn't absolve clinicians from a duty to try to understand patients' stories, interpret their meanings, and respond with care. Such efforts require clinical creativity, full engagement, and the recognition that emotions and personal feelings leak into the space between storyteller and story listener. Art objects are complex bodies of information that can challenge clinicians and trainees to become more comfortable with messy narratives as well as with ethical and aesthetic ambiguity. By slowing down and observing art, trainees can reflect on how clinicians make sense of stories that contain information that appears random and lacks coherence-and, more importantly, how clinicians draw on these stories to respond to patients' needs.

COVID-19 narratives and layered temporality

“…Jay Baruch and his coauthors, in their article about art and patients’ stories, recount an exercise with medical students where the students are asked to contemplate Cy Twombly’s Untitled (1968). The leaders ask the students to look for negative space in the abstract artwork, relating this negative space to understanding patient experience: “When you’re listening to stories, are you sensitive to the gaps, mindful of what was unsaid—perhaps even unsayable?” ( Baruch et al 2020, 430 ). Though representational and not abstract, the painting ‘Viral 01’ uses negative space—the around and between—to show loss that defies full comprehension.…”