Many little kids are artistic, creating masterpieces with crayons, Magic Markers, and watercolors. But often, as they ease out of young childhood, other interests emerge and take priority.
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July 2022Not so for Cheyanne M. Silver, MD, now a second-year resident in otolaryngology at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. “I always tell people it isn’t so much that I started being artistic at a certain time. Somewhere around age 10, some kids stop drawing and painting, but I just never did,” said Dr. Silver, who is now 30 years old. “I’ve always had a sketchbook with me.”
Cheyanne Silver, MD, stands with her piece “Resilience,” on exhibit at the Rochester Art Center in fall 2020.
Working primarily in mixed media, including drawing with ink and graphite and acrylic painting, Dr. Silver finds that her artwork helps her, and hopefully her audience, process ideas about physician wellness and burnout. Her piece “Resilience” was featured in an exhibition at the Rochester Art Center in the fall of 2020. The painting, created using acrylic paint on a wood panel, depicts her experience when she hears her medical mentors urge caution regarding her plan to pursue a surgical career as a female physician while questioning how to achieve balance between long working hours and a fulfilling personal life.
For Dr. Silver, whose family includes several medical professionals, pursuing medicine as a career was a way to integrate her love of art in a visceral way to work with and process medicine’s challenges. “I think art is a powerful way to address the fact that there are long hours, and the work is hard,” she said. “You never want to sit through another lecture about the topic of physician wellness and burnout. But being able to transition that into art and in three dimensions—it’s a powerful tool to address the issues of physician wellness that isn’t another paper to read or a seminar to attend. It isn’t as painful.”
Where Art and Medicine Intersect
Dr. Silver grew up in Iowa, where her father and maternal grandfather were physicians. Her father was an infectious disease specialist and her grandfather was a nuclear medicine researcher and later a family physician who taught residents.
Her mother was a nurse before she left the profession to raise Dr. Silver and her older brother Nicholas. “Medicine was a very common topic at dinner,” she said. “I got interested in medicine because I liked the puzzle of it all. I find people fascinating, so treating them is an endless fascination.”
Her mother worked on personal art projects such as large mosaic installations in the town of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and tended her garden, making a bee house to support a pollinator-friendly yard. “She calls herself a ‘domestic artist,’” said Dr. Silver.
Although art was important, Dr. Silver knew she didn’t want to pursue art professionally. “I found art more personal, less of a thing to market and sell to others,” she said. She focuses mostly on painting with acrylics, drawing with ink and graphite, creating digital art on her iPad using the apps Procreate and Photoshop, and a bit of photography.
“Resilience,” an artistic work by Cheyanne Silver, MD, represents the struggle of medical students
entering the field.
Finding British painter Jenny Saville while studying art in London during a semester abroad at the Camberville College of Arts helped Dr. Silver define her artistic approach. “I fell in love with her work,” said Dr. Silver. Saville, known for her large-scale observations of the obese female nude body, has observed plastic surgeons at work to more accurately convey the scars surgery leaves behind. “All the paintings were of the pre-op or intra-op portions. I love her ability to paint the vulnerability inherent in any surgery,” said Dr. Silver. “She’s fascinated, as I am, in the way you can change a human being’s form through surgery.”
Dr. Silver sees medicine, particularly surgery, as its own art form. “I think it’s a very artistic field. It became an obvious career choice for me,” she said. “Every day you wake up and operate. You know the procedures and steps, but each person is unique—you can’t predict what you’ll find. The combination of the fine hand/eye coordination, along with the sense that you’re helping others, has never bored me.”
Another piece Dr. Silver created—“Warm Blood,” acrylic and ink on wood panel—helped her to process her experience with the first patient she took care of while she was in medical school, who later died. “It was a really good way to process some of those heavy feelings surrounding my first patient death,” she said. “It was about honoring this person’s memory and the impact it had on my career. It was deeply personal, and I hope that people can look at it and enjoy the art.”
Otolaryngology and Art
After studying linguistics at the University of Iowa in Iowa City as an undergraduate, Dr. Silver attended medical school at Loyola University Chicago Stritch School of Medicine in Maywood, Ill. She’s currently in residency at the Mayo Clinic College of Medicine and Science in Rochester. She chose to specialize in otolaryngology because of its variety.
“It’s one of the few fields in surgery that isn’t limited by a system like the heart or bones,” she explained “We’re limited only by the anatomy of the head and neck. The head is an interesting canvas because you can’t hide your face like you can much of your body on a day-to-day basis. It takes a fine hand to operate.”
It’s this approach that helps Dr. Silver meld her art with the science of medicine, particularly with an otolaryngology focus. She’s interested in facial plastic surgery, both reconstructive and cosmetic. “You can really make a difference in someone’s life doing reconstructive surgery,” Dr. Silver said. “In an intense cancer resection, you see how to bring the skin together, not only cosmetically, but also in a way that’s functionally good for the patient. Cosmetic surgery is also interesting because it has the power to make people so good.
“The one difficult thing in being an otolaryngologist is that we’re on call for airway emergencies,” added Dr. Silver. “We’re the airway experts of the hospital. You get minutes to save people’s lives. It’s been a really powerful experience. Being in those situations, the pressure and calm that comes over you is profound. I’m working on an art piece right now about an emergency surgical airway where we need to hold in the trachea. There’s the brutality of that, but also the peace and the beauty of it, that we’re trained to do this and to help people in this situation.”
Looking Ahead
As Dr. Silver moves forward in her training and through her career, she realizes that making time for her art will be a challenge—but it won’t be impossible.
“I feel that it would be really difficult to not paint in the future,” she said. “I carry an iPad around with an Apple pencil and I’m always sketching to some degree, both for work to understand a surgical procedure and the anatomy, as well as to unwind. Painting is sometimes an outlet and sometimes a distraction. When you have a heavy day, it’s almost meditative in a way. I’m not thinking about the day or a patient who isn’t doing well when I paint.”
Dr. Silver creates her art at her home in Rochester, where she lives with Jennifer Silver, her wife of six years, and their dogs, a French bulldog named Nacho and a pug named Noodle. Silver is glad that Jennifer isn’t a healthcare worker; she currently works for ACT, a nonprofit organization that provides educational resources and administers a national college admissions examination. “It’s a nice break when we’re together. I can leave my work at the office,” she said.
Looking ahead, Dr. Silver is formulating an idea about creating artwork about head and neck reconstruction once her Mayo residency winds down. “In some ways it’s a very gruesome thing to reconstruct people’s faces; they’re very exposed. You can’t hide a person’s face,” she said. “But I believe it can show the beauty in the work that we do. It’s my hope to get the idea into future pieces.”
Ultimately, art helps Dr. Silver to be a better physician, and that mindset can help turn the ordinary into something that’s perhaps transformative.
“I think, at the end of the day, medicine is art,” she said. “Obviously, you can see how surgery resembles having a canvas laid out as you dissect through things. The creativity it takes to not only interact with people, how to figure out what’s wrong with them, but also to treat them—it takes an artistic brain to think through those things.”
Cheryl Alkon is a freelance medical writer based in Massachusetts.