Blood and guts and veins in the teeth
Recently, in Dicebox I have had reason to render a horse that had been partially, ah, rendered. I actually did it rather discretely, mostly draped with a tarp. People asked if I chose to cover most of the carcass to save me drawing the slimy innards.
Heck no. I find drawing such things intriguing and challenging in a truly enjoyable way. Not that I go out of my way to create storylines to include such drawing opportunities. But I have had reason to do so in the past and foresee future opportunities.
You see, I grew up the daughter of a cardiac care nurse who got quite a few medical trade magazines. These were glossy, full color magazines that featured each month pictures of subject matter such as burn victims or explicit shots of open heart surgery in that same lighting they used for 70s porn flicks so that you see every loving detail. I had been flipping through these magazines, looking at the pictures since I was at least five so when my seventh grade the class was shown these really tame airbrushed depiction of internal organs, I was surprised by the squeals of disgust by both girls and boys. Geez. Imagine if we had the Head 2 Heads flip book to pass around the class.
But then, the half of my extended family that isn’t in business, is in medicine—there are even a couple who are in the business of medicine, hospital general managers and the like. My father is a well respected animal orthopedic surgeon with his own practice in Indiana—he’s even operated on wild eagles’ wings with full success . Every summer that I’d visit entailed at least one visit to the clinic and watching Dad operate on some pet. Once, while visiting the Indianapolis Zoo when I was six or seven, Dad was asked by some Zoo staff to take a look at one of the tigers—Dad used to be a consulting vet for the Zoo, it’s how he met my step-mother, Jean. Oh, sure, they sedated the hell out of that tiger before he went in to the special holding pen. Still, I had a lot of bragging rights that day.
My family, dedicated to medicine or loving those who were, collectively thought that I might go on to do medical illustration. Thinking back, I’m rather surprised I didn’t. Beyond my upbringing I have always found well done medical illustrations very appealing. A fine example of what I consider beautiful about these illustrations can be seen in the work of Fred Harwin, especially in how he does eyes. Any reproduction of his work doesn’t do it justice. He executes his work on both sides of translucent vellum for a stunning effect; one side is mostly the line art, the other the color shading. Extraordinarily lovely art that I wouldn’t mind hanging in home, if I could afford it.
But don’t let all this lead you to believe I like slasher flicks. Oh no. People—or animals—in pain, terror or any kind of suffering upsets me greatly. In fact, I find it mystifying that some people enjoy these kind of movies, even more than why some people need to see more than one porn movie in their lifetime (okay maybe 2 or 3 porn films so you can get an idea of all the major “plots”). And I’m not talking about any movie with suspense or violence, like Donnie Darko or Alien, but the fetishistic portrayal of pain and terror, like Final Destination, which seem to move beyond the idea of cathartic release.
Not that I think that people that do enjoy these movies are Bad or Sick. Some of them happen to be friends of mine, in fact. And some of those particular friends were a little unnerved by the little bit of horse I did show. Go figure.
Oh, so why did I mostly cover the gutted horse? Well, I just didn’t think the two characters that were actually harvesting meat wanted to have that all exposed near them as they worked at wrapping what they took in order to eat.
You realize, of course, that *my* Mom the nurse *never* left that stuff lying around the house. I feel so… aesthetically unfinished now.
BTW, thanks to the miracle of ebay, I now own two mini-mags that give step-to-step demos of how to slaughter various livestock for consumption (not in color, which is just as well). So if you need any for cribbing purposes, let me know. There’s also a really good acount of a pig-killing, and the moral ambiguity ensuing in the author/artist’s mind, in my copy of Tomi Ungerer’s *Far Out Isn’t Far Enough*.
You must bring those mini-mags along when we go out for drinkies next Thursday.
If they make the boys nervous, we can always move off to a corner.
I keep forgetting your mother was a nurse at one point. Still, I think the horror stories of her next career, caterer, ought to have prepared you somewhat.
Ah, memories. My mom was a nurse, too. Our dinner conversations almost always included the nasty and gross stuff she’d encountered that day. We had all grown used to this kind of talk, but when friends came over for dinner, well, they usually left thinking we were not quite right.
“So this man set himself on fire by pouring gasoline on himself and then striking a match.He came in alive, but the lawn chair he had chosen to sit in had melted and fused to his body.”
“Really? Pass the mashed potatoes, please.”
And I, who likes a lot of those Bad and Sick movies, faint at the sight of blood if I’m not ready for it.
I find biological functions and disfunctions really fascinating until someone is telling me about the time they personally broke an arm and saw the bone sticking out . Then my stomach starts turning and I get all lightheaded. Somehow the closer it gets to home the harder it is to take.
Though when I dropped in on an ex during her lab time in her anatomy class I couldn’t resist having her show me around the cadaver she was working on.
These are good things to keep in mind as my wife the nurse and I prepare to raise a child. He will either listen intently to Jenn’s descriptions of cancer patients suffering horribly or, like his daddy, mentally edit out the gross stuff and most of the medical jargon he doesn’t understand, and listen for the important plot points. “So the doctor fucked up, then?” “Yes, weren’t you listening?” “Erm….”
Well, Kevin, the real fun will be when he sees and recognizes the odd blood splotches. Or finds the rubber tourniquets or alcohol swabs, etc.
I remember once my mother coming home with the dried evidence of a blood spray on her. Her tired response was “Oh, we had a junkie up in the unit who kept have seizures and trying to rip the IV out of her arm.”
So, Kris, which unit did your mother work in–ICU, ER or Burn? That example was pretty intense. Does your mother, too, have a violent hatred of motorcycles after dealing with enough of the spill victims? Did she used to groan when she had to work the night of a full moon?
David, as for sudden blood, I too have that problem, instant empathy tap with the injured party, as it were. Again, suffering. Which a cadaver supposedly doesn’t have–they are fascinating and I wouldn’t mind having a full human skeleton about the house. But I think Kip would object.