Calm down, Mrs Smith, no one is watching you
What the news reports I’ve seen about this painting don’t tell you is exactly who came up up with the notion that it might in some way relax hospital patients.
I’m not sure that even a pleasant portrait of the current Queen Elizabeth giving her best beatific beam could be considered “relaxing”, but how anyone might conceive that this Halloween cartoon of someone who looks a lot like the bloody Elizabeth Who Came First would calm heart patients is beyond reason.
But yes, the 1993 five-picture series “The Queens” by Shirley A Brown 1993 that was borrowed by the Ottawa Heart Institute “as part of a study” had to be removed after doctors complained that the portraits boosted their patients’ blood pressure and made them, er, impatient.
“The idea was to try to brighten up the place and make it alive,” institute chief Robert Roberts told the AFP news agency. But, he admitted, their “very piercing eyes were not necessarily the most pleasant thing to look at or cheer you up when you’re in pain”.
Some 100 paintings from Canada’s Art Bank were rented for the “experiment”, the results of which are to be presented at a healthcare conference in April.
“The areas where they were installed was a relatively dark area,” Art Bank director Victoria Henry told the CBC, no one bothering to correct her English. “The whites of the eyes are very strong. There is a creepiness in the eyes following you.”
Also binned was a painting by Paul Butler bearing the cheerful message “Getting there is half the fun”, but it didn’t work, the CBC reported, “in the context of patients heading into an operating room”. A painting of bugs was dewalled when staff pointed out that it would do nothing to ease hallucinations arising from medication, and another one that looked like the gates of heaven that was hanging outside the critical-care unit.
Shirley Brown, utterly innocent in this yarn, of course, is a medievalist and founder of the national Registry of Stained Glass Windows, so she was just doing what came natural when she painted “The Queens”. They are not pictures of Elizabeth I at all, apparently, but “angry mythical queens”, as the Ottawa Citizen put it, “who all look something like the cruel off-with-their-heads queen in ‘Alice in Wonderland’”.
Brown is also a professor at my old alma-foster-mater, York University in Toronto (whose motto, I see, has been revised to “Redefine the possible”, a big improvement on what they had in my day, “Define the impossible”).
Anyway, the queens were dethroned in favour of “three tamer silkscreen prints on cotton by Benoit Desjardins”, the Citizen says, “extreme close-ups of fragments of standing figures”. No roaming eyes. I googled this Desjardins fellow and couldn’t find him or his art.
The great Does Art Have Healing Powers experiment is set to continue. The Ottawa institute is considering “art carts” that would be wheeled into patients’ rooms so they could pick out what they want on the wall. The idea is that art can assuage the boredom and stress, if not the actual pain.
I love art, of course, but I still think a puppy would be better.
