Margaret Carrasco Arias


Operating Room 16



A New Collage



I have officially begun this essay four times. This, this version you are reading now, is the fourth version. Because it turns out that there is a lot I want to say about making my project, but I can’t piece it together cohesively. The pieces I have are not puzzle pieces; one does not start where the other begins. What I have more closely resembles collage pieces—a piece of string here, maybe some newspaper, couple cotton balls over there, maybe a ripped magazine cover, etc. And on this fourth version of this reflection, I’ve decided to accept and embrace that. Not to say that I will use this essay to ramble and rant. Rather, I have decided that I want this reflection to braid important anecdotes rather than stack paragraphs. I have decided that a written collage is much more reflective of my project, Operating Room 16, and the lessons I learned throughout.

Part I: A Little Piece of String

This is a little piece of string. Let’s call it an idea, and every bump is a major change. I like my strings to be a straight line but I tend to find good reasons for bumps along the way.

I decided what I wanted to do pretty early in fall quarter. I went into the class knowing I wanted my project to relate to medical humanities and that I wanted to use mix media—writing and painting. By the first week of class, I was also set on a specific surgical story.

After this, my project quickly developed into two parts: a story in a patient chart and ten paintings interwoven with quotes. My story was to be told from the perspectives of multiple people in the operating room. But as I began writing, I realized I could not embody the voices of such different characters realistically. Maybe a couple years down the line, I will be able to do so after more training. I found including surgical jargon in a comprehensive way difficult. There were even words and details I was not very clear on. Unfortunately, when my scientific advisor got injured and took a leave for all of winter quarter and some of spring, I decided it would be too difficult to complete my story as I had originally planned.

I also realized that some of my essay’s strength stemmed from the fact that it was non-fiction.

If I tried to be different characters, the story would have moved into fiction although based on a true story. I wanted it to be clear that this moment happened and I found it appalling.

And so, my string curved, reaching its first major chink when I realized I could not write in those voices just yet and I wanted my story to be non-fiction.
A couple weeks later in winter quarter, my idea waved a second time because of time constraints. Considering how long it took me to make two paintings, making ten would have been its own separate project.

I am ok with ideas changing. I can accept that though I am attached to my original ideas, it’s often necessary they change. My project underwent some changes that I still consider to be reasonable. I’m glad I made them. Still there are parts of my original conception I hope will be realized some day. I want to write a story told from the perspectives of the multiple people present in an operating room in the future. Similarly, I am very proud of my two paintings, which I will refer to as Gray’s and Fetal Woman, and hope to continue making paintings with the same theme.
Part II: Some Newspaper

Most of this reflection will concentrate on my paintings because I really struggled with them. Part of the reason I struggled so much with Grays and Fetal Woman was my lack of a painting artistic mentor. However, when it came to writing, my creative mentor Rosalie was so valuable and helpful. She helped me plan the story—helping me pick beginnings and ends, editing with me, figuring out length, and constantly providing helpful critique.

I had some knowledge of medical narratives before starting my story. I had read a couple short medical stories for different classes. With my mentor though, who was also my Levinthal Tutor, we studied medical narratives in depth. This ended up providing an unexpected breadth of knowledge that turned out to be extremely helpful.

Rosalie and I read and talked about multiple medical narratives and the different storytelling methods they employed. We read Anatole Broyad’s Intoxicated by My Illness and Other Writings on Life and Death and discussed his beautiful exposition. We discussed how underneath the cocky tone, Broyard managed to reveal his fear of death and desire for artistic immorality. When we read Abraham Verghese My Own Country, we talked about details the use of details. Why were there so many details in this passage? What effect did they have? Then, we’d look at my own writing and concentrate on places where I could add or remove details, depending on the purpose they served at that moment. Later, we talked about journalistic non-fiction writing when we read The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. We discussed how she produced a more journalistic, rather than essayist tone, while at the same time keeping a human, sympathetic touch to it.

I tried employing some of these stylistic methods in my own writing as I wrote and revised throughout winter quarter. Reading medical narratives intensely for my Levinthal Tutorial really provided me with even more research and advice as I wrote. So here’s some newspaper in honor of unexpected research and support from others:

Part III: A Couple Cotton Balls or Starting and Starting Over

For me like many other people, starting is the worst part. Most of my roadblocks occurred in the drawing and early stages of painting.

I did not have much trouble drawing my sketches in my small notebook. But when I looked at my 24x36 canvas, it looked massive to me. Huge. To make matters worse, the canvas was not a perfect square either the way my notebook was. So I made a large grid, sectioning the canvas by feet, and tried to do a rough sketch of Fetal Woman. Although some drawn sections looked better than other, when I began to add color, the figure stopped looking proportional.

I tried making adjustments on the canvas. But the more I painted, the worse it looked to me. The woman looked calm. She looked like a boy. She looked very young. She had no hips. Her legs were too long. Where was her second arm? So I got frustrated and decided to move onto Grays, which went relatively well.

However, now that with this painting I had finally overcome my hesitation with sketching, I became cautious while painting. The Gray’s anatomy textbook cover that served both as my inspiration and anatomical reference was incredibly detailed and specific. There were lines everywhere. The muscles, the nerves—all so precise. I wanted my pictures to evoke some of the same stylistic elements of drawn anatomy images with details in the form of lines, but I also wanted them to have the movement of brush strokes.

In trying to achieve this balance, I swayed too much towards the drawing elements at the beginning. I tried drawing lines individually with small paintbrushes, making multiple thin grey lines. As I moved into the lower body, where there were less details, I used bigger brushes, more colors, and regained the wide movement that helped create broad, beautiful strokes. In the chest, I felt comfortable letting go of my painstaking. After painting the bottom half of the painting, I returned to the neck to add more color and movement. Then eventually, I returned to details. But like making edits on an essay, as I made yellow, red, and blue lines clean and clear, the second time I paid attention to details was not motivated by caution.

I had made progress with the second painting, but the first stood in my room, haunting me. All I saw were mistakes I didn’t know how to fix. Frustration tainted it all. I hated it. I tried working on it but to no avail. I needed a new plan. But if I started over, all the time I had put into that first one was for nothing. I had failed.
And then I realized what it all came down to: fear. The problem wasn’t just that starting is hard; part of me was afraid of that once I started, I would mess up. Getting the paintings wrong was horrifying thought and starting over was terrifying beyond belief. I had only painted two small figures on 8x11 canvas paper since high school. I hadn’t painted on a canvas in ages. I hadn’t painted art that would be hung, art that other people would see, in nearly four years.
So the worst thing that I thought could happen happened, and after that, everything got better.

Some caution is good, in fact, probably recommended. But too much caution is very limiting when it comes to art. Not taking risks in art is to deny a major part of the artistic and creative process.

So I started over. I bought a tub of gesso and painted a layer of white over the whole canvas until the fetus became pink. Then I painted another layer, and finally, just to be safe, a third. I was cautious when it came to drawing—the part I was most worried about—but took precautions that made me more comfortable. I made a detailed grid over the canvas and photograph. Each 1-inch-by-1-inch box on the printed photo correlated to a 3-inch-by-3-inch box on the canvas. I broke down each line in each box. The drawing looked just like my photograph, which turned out to be unfortunate. The woman, modeled after my roommate, looked very small and extremely calm. So I took a couple of other photographs and made adjustments until Fetal Woman came together.

Then, I started painting, promising to use only big strokes, to not look back, to just go. I imagine it was easier because I had already painted the woman in fetal position before. I was also tired of being meticulous and hesitating often. I began to have fun with the painting. I painted quickly in large sections of time, so I could not stop to overanalyze and could only paint. Once I was done with reds, I played around with blue, yellows, and pinks for shadows and details.
A couple days later I brought that painting in to workshop and heard positive feedback. It was one of the most rewarding moments of spring quarter. After drafting, drawing, painting, painting over, drawing, painting over—Fetal Woman was finally there.

As a student, I was frustrated by the situation. I considered it, and part of me still does, a waste of paint, and even more so, time. At the same time, as an artist, I think the experience provided a valuable lesson. Making a mistake, or several, is not the worse thing that can happen, and to create art while afraid is a disservice.

Part IV: The Ripped Magazine Cover

The elementary school version of me also held one very, very important collage rule. Never, ever rip magazine covers. The other pages, already half-ripped and falling apart at the center of trapezoid-shaped tables, were certainly fair game but there was something destructive and offensive about using the front cover of a magazine. I would secretly cringe as another student tore away at the thick title page. ‘My god! You monster! How could you! How could you use the title page, the most sacred of all pages!’ I would think.

What was it about the cover page? Why did the cover page seem unavailable? Even given permission to use it, I felt I should. It wasn’t because I thought the cover page in and of itself had some absolute significance bestowed onto it by Southern Living. There was just something about the beginning and the end that had to be there.

I went into my last spring quarter workshop, thinking one painting was basically done and one still needed work. I left workshop feeling the same way, but which painting needed what had changed. The surgical cap was confusing for Gray’s, the face needed work, and the green was distracting. Fetal position was great, great, and in fact, didn’t even need a head. Gasp. Without a head, it was not an untouchable magazine cover. It was incomplete and lacking.

But the more I thought about a headless woman, the more I liked the idea. One painting was of a head, with no body. Wouldn’t it be fitting to have another with the body, and no head? I had already set the pictures in contrast by giving one a black background and another a white one. Removing a head, only suggesting it with washes and pencil, could add to that contrast. I wanted my paintings to be reminiscent of surgical drawings and leaving part an exposed drawing could add to that effect. I also really like paintings where I could see grid and pencil lines, but they were pros and I couldn’t do that.

Well, maybe…

No, I couldn’t. This was a cover page. To leave it off would be to rip a cover page.

But could I?

What if?

The night before workshop, I had stood in my room, reluctant to extend the muscle redness to her face. I also didn’t want to make her face skin-pink. I just had to keep experimenting with different options, I told myself. I had never thought that leaving her headless was an option.

I had just learned a important lesson in taking artistic risks, in letting go. So I took my old notion of what made a painting finished and let that go too.

And I’m glad I did.

After, a few more touches, Fetal Woman was not ‘completed’, but finished. Then I went back to editing my story that although completed, was not done. The nail had not yet been hammered in just right.

Part V: To Fridge or Not To Fridge

There’s an anti-pack-rat in me. My mom hates it. I go around, finding old collages stuffed into binders that are overflowing with her memories of me. I find pages of old notes and start throwing them out until my mom is forced to grab the binder from me and protect it close to her chest.

“They’re memories, Margaret. Stop it!”

“But Mami, why do you need a whole year of fourth grade notes! A couple pages would be fine.”

“No me lo toques,” she says and puts the binder back in her hiding place. Every now and then, I have to give her credit, when I find drawings and collages with large M-A-R-G-A-R-E-Ts on the bottom right.

As I write this, my laptop desktop is covered in little docx icons. They are different versions of my story all very similar, but gut-wrenchingly different to me—small changes, reorganization, the loss of two pages, the addition on an important paragraph. I have photos of my roommate, Jessica, in multiple fetal positions on the floor. All of them are slightly different from each other—Jessica facing left, Jessica facing right, Jessica with her head tucked in, Jessica with her back to me. I have multiple medical form pdfs—some with freemedicalforms.com at the bottom and some from the Palo Alto Medical Foundation. Parts of my project are still scattered over my laptop. At the end of winter quarter, I organized them all into a folder onto my desktop, but the contents manage to spill out anyway once spring quarter started.

Now that it’s over, I’m struggling to decide what to do with all these remnants. Should I put them all into one massive folder and tuck it away in another folder that’s in another folder in another folder? Or should I only put the final versions in my folder—only version eight of my story, after deleting all the pictures and all forms I will probably never need again? I’m conflicted.

A part of me wants to do through a post-graduation, post-quarter cleansing. Another part of me wants to commemorate the stages, the collage of adventures TSR has been.