ART OF MEDICINE
"Alex, Take the French Road"
Oil on canvas, 42 inches by 32 inches
By Lloyd H. Kasper, M.D.
Neurologist Lloyd Kasper joined the DMS faculty in 1983, right after finishing his residency at DHMC and a National Institutes of Health fellowship. But he's been doing art even longer than medicine. "I have never not been interested in art," he says. "It is my other vocation." Yet he sees art and medicine not as competing interests but as "essentially the same process. . . . Life is a two-hemispheric event, and the balance between the two is important for a fulfilling and complete life." After offering that explanation, he admits that it "sounds a little highbrow, doesn't it?" But the inspiration for this work was a pretty pedestrian pastime—another of Kasper's interests—bicycling. The painting depicts a side road in East Thetford, Vt., where Kasper often cycles, and the "Alex" in the painting's title is Dr. Alex Reeves, a retired neurology colleague and former cycling companion of Kasper's. Thetford's Pavilion Road acquired the nickname that Kasper used in the painting's title because it reminded Reeves of roads that he'd cycled on in France.
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