The American neurologist Harvey Cushing used photography as a diagnostic tool, taking before-and-after pictures of his patients for more than thirty years. Thousands of these images, housed in the Cushing Brain Registry at Yale School of Medicine (and most of which have never been seen) form the basis for a series of paintings I am making that seek to bring what is unseen—but visible—to light. The faces here are anonymous, yet universal: their expressions powerful, poignant, and profoundly human. Rather than amplifying the privileged medical gaze, the paintings themselves propose an alternative model, removed from the clinic, extended onto canvas, and rethinking the very notion of the portrait—now, more than 100 years later—as an act of compassion.
