Art Attack

They say that "the pen is mightier than the sword," and so too, the easel is mightier than the uzi. Art has the power to move us ... and perhaps also to kill us. According to an article in Ottawa Citizen, the Ottawa Heart Institute has had to remove several paintings hanging in their hypertension waiting room after they learned that patients were afraid of the paintings. As Jacques Guerette, the vice-president of communications at the heart institute, said, "The queens [in the paintings] had very intense eyes and they were triggering that feeling that they were watching you as you walked around and they were blowing all our hypertension results." Mother England is watching you, my son.

There were some other minor setbacks in the Heart Institute's attempt to use art to soothe the savage breast. As the Ottawa Citizen article remarks, "there was also the painting that looked like the gateway to heaven that was put, only briefly, at the entrance to the critical care unit -- a place where not every patient survives." I suppose the painting suggests that there are many different roads to heaven, and one of them is through the ICU.