- A review of Desiree’s 2009 London art exhibition ‘Outside In’ in Art News.
- http://www.allbuyart.com/art-news-093-desiree-cox-2009.asp
|
|
Review of Desiree’s 2009 London art exhibition in The Londonistp://londonist.com/2009/03/last_chance_to_see.php
Last Chance To See...Desiree Cox's Outside In
Light and energy radiate off the imaginative paintings currently at the Air Gallery. The work is of Desiree Cox - a unique Bahamian artist whose paintings combines her medical background with mythical worlds and conscious and unconscious explorations.
Sounds a bit out there, yet when studying the oil canvases of 'Outside In' you are instantly drawn in to another place. Desiree refers to this as ‘turning outside in and inside out’, a phrase referring to your true self. This can only be understood when taking in each one of the textures and bright colour schemes she uses to release and balance the mind.
Many of the paintings have corresponding poems that are equally uplifting. - viz lines such as ‘Moonlight silver surfing on crushed cotton pillows’. The vision is further clarified when viewing the carefully constructed canvases with their varied textured peaks and valleys, illuminating colour chords and sense of joyous movements.
Born in Nassau in 1965, Cox moved to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship to study medicine. She also bagged an MA in medical history at Cambridge, and a PhD in the philosophy of medicine. This gave her a curiosity to embrace an alternative form of healing.
Her innovative blend of medicine and creativity encouraged her to start the UK charity Performing Cures, which connects hospitals through live music, art and dramatic performances. She also started the Universal Soul Project, which enables children to confidently express themselves. Her students' work is showcased at the exhibition.
Combining science with art and poetry is always tricky to pull off, but Cox does so with brevity and flair. Her brash strokes and colourful palettes are derived from a place deep within the soul - a place she encourages everyone to look into.
Air Gallery is at 32 Dover St. The exhibition can be viewed 10.30am-6pm. Saturday is the final day.
By Tiffany Pritchard
By Londonist in Arts & Events on March 27, 2009 5:09 PM 0 Comments 1 Like
- Renaissance woman, BMJ article
ARTICLE
BRITISH MEDICAL JOURNAL
BMJ Career Focus 2004; 328:s37 (24 January), 2004
PROFILE: Renaissance Woman
Desiree C. T. Cox (previously Cox-Maksimov) has a PhD in medical history, founded a charity to promote live music in hospitals, sings jazz, and is a psychiatry trainee. She told Gavin Yamey what motivates her
Many doctors secretly dream of having a second career as a writer or performer, but our dreams get thwarted by rigid career structures and heavy on-call commitments. But if you're willing to step off the traditional career ladder, says the inspiringly energetic Desiree Cox, anything is possible. "Focus on what you really care about and don't just follow the crowd."
What Desiree really cares about are music and medicine. And growing up in the slums of Nassau, Bahamas, she must have been a pretty focused child to realise her twin passions. "My father's a barber; my mum started off as a secretary. I was the first in my family to go to university."
"Focus on what you really care about and don't just follow the crowd "
When she was five, she gave her first public performance as a singer, and by the age of 11 she was the soloist at the state funeral of the first governor general of the Bahamas. A singing career clearly beckoned, "but apparently as a child I said to my grandma that I wanted to be a doctor." To raise money to go to university, she later gave recitals and also won two Bahamian scholarships.
Not wanting to rush into medicine, she first did a bachelor of science at McGill University in Canada. She then won a Rhodes scholarship to study medicine at Oxford University in England, the first Bahamian and first woman from the British Caribbean to get this award.
The course was harrowing. "The two years of preclinical were fine, but the clinical I found emotionally difficult." She struggled with "the sickness of hospitals" and was close to leaving medicine when she found a way of viewing it "that kept me sane." Through talking with friends who were historians and philosophers at Oxford, Desiree discovered writers like Thomas Kuhn (who popularised the concept of a "paradigm shift") and Susan Sontag (author of Illness as Metaphor) and realised that medicine could be seen through lots of different lenses: "I opened my eyes to seeing medicine as a paradigm, not something real."
She decided to pursue an academic career and put off doing her house jobs. She began with a masters degree in the history of medicine at Cambridge and was encouraged to choose a topic by following her heart. "My tutor asked me, `what do you love?' and the answer was, music. This was how I got interested in the Renaissance, a period when there were no boundaries between art, music, and medicine. This resonated with me."
Her master's thesis was on one of the most important works of 17th century literature and science-Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy and was published in the journal The History of Psychiatry. For her PhD, she delved into the history of the randomised controlled trial in Britain and loved the "thrill of the chase."
"If you're enthusiastic, you can do it all."
At this point, she says, she could easily have turned the PhD intO book and settled into life as a full time academic. "But I ran out of funds in the last year of my PhD. I was on the dole and had to housesit as a way of getting by. I realised I had to earn a living, so I thought I'd do house jobs and then go back and write the book."
As with her clinical training, house jobs were a phenomenal challenge and she turned to writing fiction as a way to process her experience. During that time she helped to set up a website with Sir Ian Chalmers on the history of controlled trials (www.jameslindlibrary.org). She got the day off to present a paper at a BMJ conference to celebrate 50 years of clinical trials. It was all rather surreal: "I was a surgical house officer, up on stage with Sir Richard Doll and Philip D'Arcy Hart [two of the investigators in the first ever RCT, of streptomycin for tuberculosis]."
She then looked for a medical specialty that would give her some flexibility so she could write the book of her thesis. As a student, she had enjoyed her psychiatry attachment at the Warneford Hospital in Oxford so she applied to the training scheme at the Maudsley Hospital in London.
But after the privilege of Oxbridge, she was "shocked by the deprivation of south London. I couldn't believe how much people with mental illness suffered." She would hear patients' disturbing stories, then "go home and weep every night." She continued to channel her emotions into writing fiction.
But although she was writing, "there was still an emptiness, something missing." Life came full circle, and she started singing again, first taking opera lessons at the Guildhall School of Music in London and then learning jazz.
Keen to pursue her renewed interest in music, she took a six month sabbatical. It was then that she had the idea of trying to bring live music into hospitals. Drug companies weren't interested in supporting the idea, but she managed to find £1000 from a foundation at Guy's and St Thomas's Hospitals in London.
"I went on to the streets to look for musicians who could really communicate with people." The result was two days of live music, one at Guy's and one at St Thomas's. After receiving many letters of support, she founded the charity Performing Cures, which now has a programme director and a commercial director, and which aims to "bring a spirit of joy and possibility through live music and dramatic performances in the public spaces of hospitals."
Desiree went back to working full time again at the Maudsley and miraculously managed to fit her medical, musical, literary, and academic pursuits into a 24 hour day. How does she manage it, and still get some sleep? "If you're enthusiastic, you can do it all."
"I don't see myself climbing up the psychiatric ladderin a traditional way."
She has just begun a post to consult on the Urban Renewal Commission of the Bahamas, a commission set up by the Bahamian prime minister to help with the social transformation of the country: "it's a dream come true: the privilege of making a difference to the people and country of my birth."
Desiree's future looks bright: a first novel in the works, plans to record an album, and the charity to promote. She is unlikely to follow a conventional career path to becoming a consultant. "I don't see myself climbing up the psychiatric ladder in a traditional way." Instead of climbing the ladder, she'll be guided constantly by the question: "What speaks to my heart?"
Gavin Yamey, deputy physician editor