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A virus that robbed David Jane of his language and memory left him struggling to understand what had happened to him. His salvation was to recreate his condition on canvas. For\u00a0New Scientist, 10 January 1998<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n
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DAVID JANE\u2019s studio in south London is falling to pieces. Plaster has come
\noff the walls, revealing the wattling and brick beneath. Felt sags from a hole
\nin the roof. Every fractured surface frames another deeper, broken layer. It is
\neasy at first\u2014and painful\u2014to see parallels between the dereliction
\nof Jane\u2019s studio and his paintings, which are based on magnetic resonance
\nimaging (MRI) scans of his own, damaged brain. \u201cIt can be a very heavy
\nexperience to be drawing things that you know are inside you,\u201d muses Jane. \u201cThey
\nlook like animals\u2014like they have separate lives.\u201d<\/p>\nJane calls his work self-portraiture, albeit of a unique, and at first
\ndisturbing, kind. Wax surfaces bleed away to reveal other surfaces beneath.
\nThese frames within frames reflect the way the medical scanner slices his brain
\ninto a sequence of flat, two-dimensional images. But Jane\u2019s fusion of art
\nand science is not about deterioration. It is about understanding\u2014and more
\nthan that, it is about recovery and regeneration.<\/p>\nUntil 1989, Jane enjoyed a growing reputation as a painter. But that year,
\nwhile on holiday in Rio de Janeiro, he collapsed. When he woke up in London some
\nweeks later, he could not speak, write or recognise his family or himself. At
\nfirst he had no memory, and no awareness of the passage of time. Days, minutes,
\nmonths all seemed of equal duration, so that even when some memories did return,
\nhe could make little sense of them. On one occasion he left the hospital in his
\ndressing gown and boarded a bus to visit his mother, who was dead. Much of his
\nrecovery since then has been spent organising his experience into some kind of
\nsensible order.<\/p>\nWhat Jane didn\u2019t know during his stay in hospital\u2014what nobody could
\ntell him\u2014was that he had contracted herpes simplex encephalitis. For
\nreasons that are still unknown, the virus has a predilection for certain areas
\nof the brain in some people. The body\u2019s response is to dispatch immune cells to
\nthe site of infection. This causes swelling which, together with the virus, can
\nkill off neurons and literally leave holes in the brain. In Jane, the virus
\ntargeted the left temporal lobe, which is responsible for memory and
\nlanguage.<\/p>\nJane\u2019s basic faculties began to return within a few weeks and he was able to
\nleave hospital. But it was not until June 1990\u2014when new MRI scans were
\ntaken\u2014that he began to understand what had happened to him. Because he had
\nlost his language skills to the virus, Pat, his wife, realised that pictures
\nwould be the easiest, most direct way of explaining to him what had happened. It
\nwas she who first showed him the brain scans.<\/p>\n\u201cThe doctors were reluctant to show me them,\u201d he remembers. \u201cBut the fact is,
\nI found them beautiful.\u201d Jane could also see from the scans that the left-hand
\nside of his brain was different from the right. \u201cSo I began to understand what
\nhad happened inside my brain.\u201d<\/p>\nJane began to use his skills as an artist to make simple ink and pencil
\ncopies of the pictures he was shown. The copies were crude and amorphous,
\nliteral reflections of the scans. But in the eight years since the virus struck,
\nJane has made a remarkable recovery\u2014and it\u2019s all there in his work. His
\ndrawings of tissue have given way to paintings that depict images of the mind
\nand then to full-scale exhibitions. Visceral and urgent, Jane\u2019s images are an
\namalgam of abstract style and biography, combined in ways which he could never
\nhave imagined before his illness. And his originality is attracting attention:
\nthe canvases have fired the enthusiasm of critics and collectors.<\/p>\nJane\u2019s growth as an artist has coincided with a burgeoning ability to face
\nhard truths. \u201cI\u2019ve been using a computer lately to manipulate some recent
\nscans,\u201d he says. \u201cIt\u2019s been depressing, seeing so clearly how much brain I\u2019m
\nmissing.\u201d<\/p>\nThe herpes infection left Jane inhabiting a very strange world. Just how
\nstrange can be gleaned from the fact that he had to relearn many things from
\nscratch, such as the names of different parts of the body. His regained mastery
\nof speech is something he can largely credit to his son, Frank, who was born in
\n1991. The child\u2019s appetite for bedtime stories gave Jane a perfect
\nreintroduction to words. Reading to his son, he acquired the language by easy
\nstages, as a child might.<\/p>\nJane\u2019s recovery is not total. Names still elude him, and reading is difficult
\nand slow. \u201cEven manipulating images on a computer is taking me ages,\u201d he laughs.
\n\u201cI can\u2019t follow the bloody menus.\u201d Nevertheless, it is staggering how much he
\nhas relearnt\u2014and how he relearnt it. His damaged brain\u2019s appetite for
\nlearning continues to amaze him. \u201cI remember I wanted to learn English,\u201d he
\nsays, \u201cbut what I ended up with at first was something completely different. The
\nspellings were all wrong, but they had this weird internal consistency. It was
\nas though my brain knew better than I did how to learn. It was rewiring itself
\ninto a shape that suited itself. Me, I was just along for the ride.\u201d<\/p>\nThat sense of alienation\u2014of surfing a healing wave over which he has no
\ncontrol\u2014has never entirely gone away. \u201cI feel I have a relationship with
\nwhat\u2019s inside of me,\u201d he says. \u201cObviously I can\u2019t actually separate `it\u2019 from
\n`me\u2019, but there is some sort of dialogue there.\u201d Jane has learnt to harness that
\ndialogue in his work. \u201cThe distance I feel between my self and the brain I see
\nin the scans\u2014I try to turn that into the distance that an artist has to
\ntheir subject,\u201d he says.<\/p>\nOver the past eight years he has continued to succeed at his task. As he got
\nbetter, the images from which he works\u2014the scans
\nthemselves\u2014underwent remarkable technical improvement. Unlike the earliest
\nimages of his brain, MRI today generates high-resolution colour pictures. These
\nadvances have helped to fuel Jane\u2019s imagination. \u201cOver time, my paintings get
\nless and less like illustrations,\u201d he explains. \u201cThese days you won\u2019t find
\nliteral correspondences between the paintings and the scans. On the other hand,
\nthanks to those scans, my understanding of what happened, and what each part of
\nthe brain does, gets more and more precise.\u201d<\/p>\nIn 1994, Jane began to add solidity and texture to his works by painting in
\nwax. For a long time he has wanted to get rid of the signatures in his
\nwork\u2014the array of distinct brush strokes. \u201cYou don\u2019t necessarily want to
\nput your emotion into every stroke,\u201d he says. \u201cThe emotion belongs to the piece
\nas a whole.\u201d<\/p>\nHe has found a way to \u201cdraw with heat\u201d, often burning holes in a painting
\nwith a blowtorch. By putting several such sheets together, Jane mimics the
\neffect of looking at the scanned slices of his brain. Behind one layer of tissue
\nlies another. He turns the canvases as he works, forcing the wax to run in all
\ndirections, creating images that echo the destruction of his own brain. \u201cLooking
\nat the scans,\u201d he says, \u201cit\u2019s clear my disease wasn\u2019t very interested in
\ngravity. It moved freely in three dimensions. The damaged shape has a weightless
\nquality.\u201d<\/p>\nIn cultural terms, Jane sees his brand of portraiture, with its scientific
\nfoundations, as a completely natural part of a continuing tradition. \u201cI don\u2019t
\nthink there\u2019s a clear distinction between art and science,\u201d he says. \u201cThey
\nchange at the same time.\u201d This progressive partnership has been in evidence
\nsince at least the 16th century, he says. He speaks with authority, although it
\nis a curious consequence of his condition that he cannot give the names of the
\nartists who would prove his point. Those memories are no longer there.<\/p>\nBut he remains undeterred. His latest venture is also his most ambitious: a
\ncollaborative exhibition with his neurologist, Michael Kopelman of St Thomas\u2019
\nHospital in London. Kopelman, together with Alan Colchester\u2019s image-processing
\nteam at the University of Kent in Canterbury, has taken a new series of scans of
\nJane\u2019s brain and created three-dimensional images of it. Jane intends to enlarge
\nthese pictures to about 2 metres square and then work wax, pigment oil, charcoal
\nand other materials into the images to enhance their 3D appearance. Then he will
\noverlay pages of text taken from reports by doctors, critics and scientific
\ncommentators, so the pictures become a palimpsest of experience and
\ninterpretation.<\/p>\n\u201cWe can meld science and art together,\u201d says Jane. \u201cAnd we\u2019ll do that not to
\nobscure what\u2019s going on, or prettify it, but to make it clear. Dr Kopelman and I
\nwant to open the doors of understanding into the scientific interpretation and
\nartistic vision of brain scan images, so that people can see them as things of
\nbeauty as well as knowledge.\u201d<\/p>\nFor many critics, however, Jane\u2019s work far exceeds these stated ambitions.
\n\u201cWhen you look at David Jane\u2019s work,\u201d says Denna Jones, curator at the
\nLondon-based Wellcome Centre for Medical Science, \u201cyour reactions aren\u2019t
\nanything to do with disease. It\u2019s not even to do with that interest in
\nbody-mapping you see so much of these days. It\u2019s simply a continuation of
\nself-portraiture\u2014part of a tradition five centuries old.\u201d If the
\n18th-century painter William Hogarth had had access to the technology Jane uses,
\n\u201che\u2019d probably have done the same thing\u201d, says Jones.<\/p>\nJane doesn\u2019t disagree. \u201cI was always considered an abstract artist and I
\nnever felt happy with that,\u201d he reflects. \u201cI certainly can\u2019t be called
\n`abstract\u2019 now, at any rate. You can\u2019t get more visceral than to paint your own
\nbrain.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A virus that robbed David Jane of his language and memory left him struggling to understand what had happened to him. His salvation was to recreate his condition on canvas. For\u00a0New Scientist, 10 January 1998 DAVID JANE\u2019s studio in … Continue reading