The artist who creates beauty from scars

Artist Celebrates Scars’ Fierce Beauty -- by RANDY KENNEDY

WASHINGTON — The gated garrison of the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, with its bunkerlike hospital, is not the first place you might expect to find an art exhibition in this city.

And even if you found the show, inside the National Museum of Health and Medicine right around the corner from the vitrine containing the derringer bullet that killed Abraham Lincoln , you would probably be surprised to see the walls adorned with vaguely Conceptual-looking monochromatic prints featuring jagged ridges and blotches resembling some kind of late- Jackson Pollock experiment on loan from the Guggenheim.

Yet their titles sound a lot less like museum labels than the check-in charts at a hospital trauma center: “Splenectomy”; “Lung Removal After Suicide Attempt”; “Broken Eye Socket Repair Using Bone From the Skull After Car Accident”; “Arm Reconstruction After Motorcycle Accident.”

These seemingly abstract textures and surfaces are actually images of scars, many of them terrifyingly impressive and some acquired by their wearers with great suffering.

Ted Meyer, a Los Angeles artist, made the prints over the last several years directly from the bodies of friends, acquaintances and willing strangers.

First he applies block-print ink to the scars and the skin around them and then presses paper to skin to make several direct contact images, which he highlights slightly with gouache and pencil.

The exhibition, “Scarred for Life,” which just opened, runs through March.

While the prints might seem grimly confrontational, descendants of the more shocking strains of 1960’s and 1970’s body art, Mr. Meyer professes not to be a fan of much postmodern art and shuddered visibly when someone brought up Chris Burden, a fellow Angeleno who famously had himself shot in the arm and at another time had his hands nailed to the roof of a car in the service of art.

By contrast, Mr. Meyer, 48, a longtime painter, commercial illustrator and author of two humorous books about cats, sees scars not so much as bleak records of injury and bodily invasion but as evidence of healing and resilience.

The subject is much more than an aesthetic concern to him. He was born with Gaucher disease, a rare genetic disorder that afflicts the joints and organs. His spleen was removed he was 6, he had the first of two hip replacements in his early 30’s, and it is only recently, with the help of a new enzyme replacement drug, that he has been able to live a relatively healthy life.

In 1998, at an art opening in Beverly Hills, Calif., Mr. Meyer met an actress and dancer, Joy Mincey Powell, who had been partly paralyzed by a fall that left her with long intertwined surgery scars down the middle of her back. The idea for making imprints of scars grew out of their conversations, and the woman became the first of Mr. Meyer’s “models.”

Finding other willing subjects was not nearly as easy. “I’d see someone in the supermarket line with a great scar,” he said. “But I resisted the urge to approach them. It was just too creepy.” But word began to spread through his network of friends, and a procession of the profoundly scarred began to show up at his downtown Los Angeles studio.

Along with the scars, the models — whose pictures are used in the exhibition but without their names — brought the harrowing accounts of how they got their bodily trophies of injury and illness survived. One man, who contributed the longest scar in the show — 28 inches, a long sinuous slash that looks like an aerial view of the Grand Canyon — had tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest, but somehow missed his heart and, after surgery to remove a damaged lung, lived.

Another man had volunteered as a test patient at a medical imaging center, which offered him a free scan of an injured knee. In the process, the center found a lump in the man’s abdomen. Pancreatic cancer was caught early, and the man lived, with a jagged diagonal scar just to the left of his navel to attest to his great luck. (Of course, Los Angeles being what it is, some models offered up celebrity back stories as well as their scars. One man, who had an intestinal operation, played the part of a storm trooper in the first “Star Wars” movie. Joy, the woman in the wheelchair, had a recurring role on the television series “The Division.”)

Mr. Meyer said he had exhibited some of the scar prints at small shows in California but had been looking for years for the right place to show them all. “I’d approached conventional galleries,” he recalled, “but they said, ‘Look, nobody wants an intestinal reconstruction hanging over the couch.’ ”

The National Museum of Health and Medicine was founded in 1862 as the Army Medical Museum, with a current collection of thousands of invaluable and often bizarre historical objects, including Paul Revere’s pewter dental tools and the preserved leg of a man suffering from elephantiasis. About a decade ago, it began to venture into exhibitions of art as well as those of artifacts.

“People come to this museum sometimes with a little trepidation, a little concern about what they’re going to see around the next corner,” said Adrianne Noe, the museum’s director. “When they get the opportunity to see medical objects or processes documented in art, they feel that they’re a little more approachable.”

Dr. Noe said that when she first saw Mr. Meyer’s scar prints about a year and a half ago, “it just clicked.”

“There’s something universal about a scar — everyone has one or knows someone who does,” she said. “But your scar is yours, like a fingerprint. It doesn’t look like anyone else, so there’s this great quality of the particular and the personal, too, that made the work very powerful for me.”

The show also resonates because of its location, just a few blocks from the main Walter Reed hospital, where thousands of wounded soldiers have been treated over the decades, the most recent returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.

After almost a decade of collecting art-worthy scars, Mr. Meyer said, finding them is much easier now and he even has the luxury of being picky. “There’s no modesty about it,” he said. “It can be in the middle of an art show and people are pulling down their pants and lifting their shirts and saying, ‘Hey, look at my scar.’ ”

As if to prove the point, at the show’s opening, the public affairs officer for the museum, Steven Solomon, soon approached Mr. Meyer and, undoing the top buttons of his striped dress shirt, proudly displayed a recent scar from the implantation of a defibrillator in his chest — the aftermath of a heart attack he had suffered while driving.

“What do you think?” Mr. Solomon asked.

Mr. Meyer leaned in and took a good look. “I like it,” he said. “I think we can work together.”