Even more anatomical art!

We'll get to the anatomical art, but first I want to show you an upcycling collage I made. The oilcloth mural above used to hang in the gathering room of the church where Dear Husband and I now attend. After decades and decades with pride of place after having been donated by a parishioner, it suffered water damage during renovations, not to mention looking dated. On top of that, it depicts Saint George slaying a dragon for Mary, Queen of Scots, an allegory for Catholicism defeating Protestantism. So, yeah, maybe no longer something to have in the living room of a Presbyterian church.

The mural was removed and cut into pieces if congregants wanted to keep a memento. DH wanted the dragon, but someone else had snagged it, so he picked up the queen, which we loaded into the car with some difficulty on a windy Sunday after church. He wanted display her on his office wall, so I found a 3' x 4' frame online and invested in some supplies (black paint, silk roses, flower beads, old jewelry I no longer wear).

Then the person with the knight and dragon decided she didn't have a place for it and gifted it to DH. So I purchased another frame. When both had arrived, my Awesome Parents helped me prep and frame them. I then added the three-dimensional flourishes on the acrylic cover, so as not to damage the original mural.

They are so large that with the decorations, we could only fit one into his car at a time, so I will update this post once the second one makes it to the church and the building staff are able to hang them high on the wall above the couch in DH's office.

 

UPDATE: The Knight and Queen have been hung! In Dear Husband's office, that is. Sorry that the light isn't better.

Now to the anatomical art. I am slowly accumulating a collection from cross-stitch to collages to the piece d'resistance, a quilled paper skull and brain. Over the holidays I saw a social media post about the multi-media artwork of Emma Pannell, who uses upcycled materials in her embroidery and beading. I just loved this turquoise-colored hand with its copper wire and stones, so I treated myself to a print and a frame to match the ones above. Since she works in Great Britain, I had to pay a tariff and cut down the A4 size to fit my American frame, but it adds such a pop of color (especially since I left room on the wall for two other pieces I have been watching on Etsy, and they tend more to a brown palette). Now DH and I will have art in our offices in different parts of the city but in the same frame.

The second new piece was a surprise from friend J.R., who made a pair of sooty yet sparkly lungs out of resin and gifted it to me while we were in Tennessee. It reminded me of the antique medical dictionary a colleague had gifted me back in residency, Robley Dunglison's Medical Lexicon (1854). That led to a project on the history of Black Lung combined with a lesson on racial and cognitive bias in clinical reasoning that I have presented locally a few times.

While the semi-circular cut outs on either side fittingly made it look like an ashtray when flat, I don't have a lot of horizontal space on which to display it, and I thought I would get to enjoy the piece more if I hung it on the wall. In my stash of frames from the Goodwill store, I found a white, square one that wasn't quite deep enough to encase the lungs. After a moment's hesitation, I decided to cut out the "melanosis" and "pulmonary" pages from the dictionary as a background. Then I mounted the lungs on the glass to create a sort of shadow-box effect.

Besides the fact that I decoupaged the pages 90-degrees off from the original hanger and had to affix a new one on the back, I'm really pleased with how it turned out: old and new, two-dimensional and three-dimensional, in a spot where I will always see it from my desk.

Dazzling holiday lights

When My Awesome Parents told us they were coming for New Year's, I bought us tickets to Dazzling Nights Pittsburgh at the Pittsburgh Botanical Garden. Dear Husband and I have regularly attended the holiday flower and light show at the Phipps Botanical Garden, but I wanted to do something different. A company comes in to set up forests of lights along the pathways. It was an impressive variety of strings, rings, flowers, rods, arches, Christmas trees, and other shapes. There were natural trees illuminated in neon lights, a fairy forest of dancing pinpoints of lights, and a cathedral of candles and stained-glass windows. Everything was even more magical because of a full moon overhead and snow on the ground, softening the landscape and crunching under foot. I just didn't anticipate that it was going to be 20 freaking degrees Fahrenheit. We made it 2/3 through the park before deciding our fingers were icicles, and we had seen enough. Inside was an exhibit of quilts by Black artists, but nothing in the gift shop enticed us enough to be purchased.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!