Last year the Canadian Pain Society (CPS) launched its first-ever Art Competition, with plans to make it an annual event. One of the overarching aims of this event was to “share images that can help us better understand pain” (1), by having a different theme each year.
The theme of the 2021 contest was “Imagining Pain”, and asked entrants to describe: “How do YOU Define Pain?” (1) The more specific goals of the first-ever CPS art contest were to:
- Engage a broad audience in order to learn more about pain and how it affects people’s lives
- Showcase the variety of images presented by our members, including clinicians, scientists, educators and patients
- Promote scientific curiosity in all audiences
- Build a database of images related to pain
- Contribute to knowledge mobilization and develop new tools for teaching and communication (1)
It was quite a surprise when my watercolour painting of a mosquito won, in the category for “People with Lived Experience” (PWLE) of pain. (1) That’s just another term for (pain) patients, like me. The other winner was in the category for “trainees and faculty”, meaning healthcare professionals. This group includes doctors, nurses, physical and occupational therapists, and others who treat people in pain – along with researchers, and healthcare students or trainees.
There was a third category in this art contest, for “Scientific images” (1), but they didn’t receive any last year. These would include medical or scientific images, taken by instruments or machines like high-powered microscopes, scans, and X-rays. Some of my favourite scientific images are of brain cells called neurons, which are important in pain research. They can be gorgeous when coloured dyes are used, to highlight different parts of the neurons. (2)
The theme for the 2022 edition of the Canadian Pain Society art contest, now called the “CPS Art Awards”, is a really important topic; “Pain and Mental Health”. (3) The CPS Awards 2022 webpage describes the interplay of mental health and chronic pain in this way:
Pain, especially when chronic, is frequently intertwined with a variety of mental health problems. The relationship is bi-directional. Pain conditions tend to influence our emotions and thoughts, and vice versa, people suffering from mental health conditions commonly have pain in one or more locations in their bodies. Considering the impact that the Covid-19 pandemic has had on mental health globally, it is possible that this bi-directional relationship may have been strengthened in the last two years. Thus, we believe that this year’s theme offers an excellent opportunity for PWLE, researchers, trainees, and clinicians to express the complexity into an art form.” (3)
I should mention that, from the start, even the 2021 CPS Art Competition wasn’t simply about ‘painting a picture’ so to speak. Each entry had to include a short essay, explaining how the submitted artwork – only one entry per person – reflected the theme. These were the basic guidelines for these art contests, of what has to be written into the online submission form (1):
- Create a ‘Catchy title”, using up to 15 words
- In plain language, explain the meaning of the artwork, with no more than 200 words
- Describe the techniques or technologies used to create the image, of up to 50 words
This year’s topic, of pain and mental health, really touched home. Not only for me, but because my husband – my sweetheart – lives with depression. And I know that my chronic pain condition, the Complex Regional Pain Syndrome (CRPS) with which I’ve been living since 2016, affects him and his depression. I felt that I really had to participate in this year’s art contest, to help show that persistent pain affects many lives – not only the person who lives with it.
He often describes his depression as having “a head full of bricks”, and that was my inspiration for this painting. Like the image of a long-ago prisoner in a striped uniform, carrying a weight around their ankle… but with the ‘weights’ around a person’s brain instead. Each brick represents a different impact of pain or of mental health on this person – or of both combined.
It was also important for me to portray what several pain patients have described to me over the years about living with anxiety; a feeling of their thoughts are going ‘round and round’ in their head, like an inescapable whirlwind of concerns, fears, and worries. To try to capture that, I showed this person’s brain as a series of concentric circles. But I left some little breaks in these circles, some ways that a person might escape their anxiety – if they can get appropriate multi-disciplinary healthcare and support.
And, of course, I had to show pain in some way in my watercolour. I chose a common symbol for pain to do this, a lightening bolt. It’s positioned right at the base of the brain, at the brain stem, because pain signals are transmitted up to the brain through the spinal cord.
The colours I chose are sombre, almost dark, very unusual for me. This whole painting was developed specifically for the theme of pain and mental health, so I tried to infuse every part of it with concepts relating to these two oft-entangled conditions. From the dark colours to the bold shapes, to the lack of detail in the background, all of this was really a ‘concept artwork’ for me. Something completely different.
And yet… I still wanted my painting to be hopeful. I’m a happy and optimistic person who happens to have a particularly nasty pain condition. I don’t live with anxiety or depression myself, but I can see how these conditions affect people I love. This painting is, in many ways, for them. And it’s not lost on me that the word ‘pain’ is part of the word ‘painting’…
How could I convey hope in such a dark artwork? In the same way that I left breaks in those concentric circles of anxious thoughts, I tried to show these ‘bricks’ as falling away. I wanted viewers to imagine the person being ‘freed’ – at least in some small way – from their suffering of chronic pain and/or mental health.
With my husband’s permission, I’m sharing this story here, in more detail than I was able to include in my 200-word essay for the art contest. And because only members of the CPS can enter this art contest, and I’m not sure whether anyone else will be able to view the entries online, I’ll also share what I included as part of my online submission form for the 2022 CPS Art Awards.
Chronic pain affects predominantly women, meaning that more women than men live with persistent pain. So rather than showing a man’s profile in my painting, inspired by my husband, I wanted to create a somewhat generic face that looked slightly more feminine:
Chronic pain affects a higher proportion of women than men around the world; however women are less likely to receive treatment.
Research has shown that women generally experience more recurrent pain, more severe pain and longer lasting pain than men.” (4)
Now here’s the text from my online submission form. For my ‘catchy title’, I went with “Entangled: Persistent pain and mental health”. I’d come up with a whole list of possible names for this watercolour, even while I was still painting it, but I couldn’t pick just one. In the end, I asked my sweetheart to choose his favourite one from all of these. Which title would YOU have chosen for this painting?
- Entangled: Persistent pain and mental health (the one he chose)
- Persistent pain, like depression, means living with a head full of bricks (his second choice)
- Intertwined, the impacts of persistent pain on mental health
- The mental health toll of living with persistent pain, invisible but very present
- Pain clouds, not rain clouds, hanging over my head
- Enmeshed: Persistent pain and mental health
- Never just one thing, the impacts of persistent pain on mental health
- Interwoven | Strands of mental health bent, or broken, by persistent pain
- Elucidating entanglements | Can art describe the mental health impacts of persistent pain?
Next, I had to write a short essay about this painting, and I couldn’t use more than 200 words. That was quite a challenge for me, because – as you might have noticed from this blog! – I really do like to write. Here’s my 200-word plain-language explanation of how my painting reflects the 2022 art contest theme of ‘pain and mental health’:
Chronic pain affects more women than men. We don’t know why, because past research has mostly involved men. Added to that historic unfairness, women’s pain has often been ignored or even disbelieved by doctors and nurses. So many women in pain end up feeling traumatized, simply from trying to get medical help with their pain. Constant pain can interfere with your sleep, concentration and focus, ability to plan your daily tasks – and sometimes your ability to look after yourself and your loved ones. You might have to cut back on your work hours, or to stop working altogether. These are just a few of the impacts of chronic pain on a person’s life. Pain can lead to financial problems, unstable housing, child custody issues, and more. It’s no wonder that many people who live with pain also have mental health problems. This painting is meant to show the different mental health burdens caused by chronic pain… The pain itself, always there, and worries about the future: Will the pain ever end? What will be the impact of pain on your family, finances, friendships, job, or studies? How can you explain your pain to others, if they can’t even see it?”
~ Sandra Woods
Finally, my online submission form for the 2022 CPS Art Awards had to include a very short description of the techniques used to create my painting. Although the instructions said that we could use up to 50 words for this, the online form cut off my text after only 34 words. This is what I planned to include, the full fifty words:
Eight successively darker layers of colours/pigments were applied to white cotton-paper. After each layer of colour had dried, several parts of the watercolour were protected from subsequent layers of paint; the palest portions have the fewest layers. A complex process, reflecting the complex entanglement of chronic pain and mental health.”
~ Sandra Woods
After the online form cut off my text after only about 30 words, I decided to rewrite my description. This is the version that I ended up submitting, to explain how I created this painting. I don’t like it nearly as much as the original version, but I suppose it gets my message across; like the interplay of chronic pain and mental health, my process was complex:
This complex layering process reflects the complex entanglement of chronic pain and mental health. Eight successively darker colours were used, and after each dried some areas of the watercolour were protected from subsequent colours.”
~ Sandra Woods
Each of the artworks submitted for this year’s CPS Art Awards will be evaluated based on three different criteria, the same ones used for last year’s art contest. These are:
- “The visual quality of the image (aesthetics and emotional impact)
- Effectiveness in demonstrating the theme
- Simplicity and clarity of the descriptive text” (3)
The winners of the 2022 CPS Art Awards will be announced next month, at the annual conference of the Canadian Pain Society. This ‘annual scientific meeting’ (ASM) will be held here in Montréal this year, as it was in 2018, so I’ll be there in person again this year.
If you’re a long-time follower of this blog, you may recall that I live-tweeted the 2018 Canadian Pain Society ASM, and I’ll be doing the same again this year. You can follow all the tweets about this conference, not only mine, by checking the hashtag #CanadianPain22, on Twitter.
So wish me luck, if you like my painting – and my descriptions of how it reflects on chronic pain and mental health! As always, thanks so much for stopping by. Feel free to reach out over on Instagram or Twitter with any comments – I love hearing from you! But I’ve had to disable the Comments feature here on the blog, as it was too much for me to handle after I developed a mild cognitive impairment from my CRPS in 2018. Keep safe, stay well, and take the time to look after your mental health!
References:
(1) Canadian Pain Society. CPS Art Competition 2021 – “Imagining pain”. Webpage. Undated. Online. Accessed 19 Apr 2022. (Access may be restricted to CPS members):
(2) Maria Morrell, University of Michigan. Sunburst. Art Under the Microscope – Cell Picture Show. Cell Press; Elsevier Inc. Webpage. Undated. Online. Accessed 19 Apr 2022:
https://www.cell.com/pictureshow/art-under-the-microscope
(3) Canadian Pain Society. CPS Art Awards 2022. Webpage. Undated. Online. Accessed 19 Apr 2022. (Access may be restricted to CPS members):
(4) International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP). Pain in Women. Webpage. 2021. Online. Accessed 19 Apr 2022:
(5) Canadian Pain Society. Annual Scientific Meeting. Webpage. Undated. Online. Accessed 19 Apr 2022. (Access may be restricted to CPS members):