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ARTIST & GALLERY

(continued)

At first I was taken aback by the cadavers, but the strange light in the room and the change on the colors in the room because of this light, kept me going. It was a strong side light that silhouetted figures against the back of the room, and the tremendously strong arc lamps that were overhead seemed to make the bodies almost transparent in the tank bed. The lights allowed one to look straight down into the cadavers without one's head casting shadows. Then I found myself studying the students moving into the large room like those nude models in Rodin's studio. I watched them learn, trying to correlate the material from the schematic drawings in the Atlas with the seemingly confused arrangements in the bodies. The live ones and the still ones. The tension in this room. The sense of survival among the students. And such a different type of student from the average one. This was a very special group being trained to be sensitive to another human being. The students took me in and, helped by on the spot art lessons, began to be very comfortable around me: I relieved some of their tension from the cadaver, like the comic foil in Shakespeare's plays. I was a part of that life and I appreciated how one human being affects another.