Lynn Randolph is an artist with a mission. At the Texas MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, she draws the end of life visions of the dying. She creates brief, but intimate, relationships with these dying patients and their caregivers.
“Heaven,” a colored pencil sketch of the scene a patient described. Lynn Randolph
The Art
Her work is sponsored by a nonprofit organization called Collage: The Art for Cancer Network, which was inspired by a Georgia O’Keeffe quote, “I found I could say things with colors and shapes that I couldn’t say any other way, things I had no words for.”
Randolph talks to people from all walks of life. There was a man in his 60s who grew up near beaches. She asked him her standard question of if he had an image in his mind that had meaning for him. He told her a raindrop he saw before he was admitted, he talked about how far it traveled and it endured a storm to be there at that moment.
So she pondered the image, she writes:
I thought about the image. The drop would dissolve and be absorbed into the earth, like all of us. I drew what he was describing: a window looking out on subtle shapes of trees and bushes, a narrow path obscured by slanting lines of rain, and in the center of the pane, a raindrop. He took the drawing and held it closely. There was his raindrop, a small oval shape on a piece of white paper. He looked at me as if we had discovered the universe.
She asks the patients what they love, what has meaning to them. Because of this she has drawn everything from a beach to Mickey Mouse with angel wings.
Why She Does This
Randolph’s husband was a patient at MD Anderson and died in 2000. She was heartbroken. It took time and many paintings to process her grief. Which gave her the idea that art could help others. While at first doctors were skeptical, they now embrace what Randolph can do. They even refer her to patients.
See Randolph’s beautiful artwork here.