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It’s not every day that medical students are given the opportunity to demonstrate their artistic and empathetic sides.
But once that opportunity appeared in the form of a contest, UCF’s Shawna Bellew seized it and won.
According to the American Medical Association’s website, Bellew and 33 medical students from around the country participated in the first AMA Humanities Initiative.
The medical-themed art contest encourages future doctors to identify with patients. This year’s theme urged its participants to express empathy through poetry and art.
Submissions were due by June 1 and were displayed and judged during the AMA-MSS Annual Meeting on June 10. Bellew’s winning still-life painting, “The Standardized Patient,” depicts the different parts of an artist’s mannequin tied together with rope.
Bellew attributed the inspiration for her work to her first art professor. “It was actually an assignment for my first painting class at UCF,” she said. “So, I have to give a lot of credit to my professor, Carla Poindexter, who created this still-life in the art studio. The assignment was to use the still-life to make a surrealist type painting in the style of De Chirico.”
Following those instructions, Bellew attempted and managed to create a “surreal environment” by depicting the body parts as a “foreboding architectural structure, like the looming towers in a De Chirico.”
