Though interested in drawing and painting from an early age, much of Anne Adams's adult life was spent in left-brain activities. Born in Toronto in 1940, she graduated with an Honours BSc in Physics and Chemistry from the University of Toronto in 1962 and taught at that institution for a couple of years until her first child with husband Robert was born in 1964. The family moved to Vancouver in 1966 where Robert became a Professor of Mathematics at the University of British Columbia. When, in 1975, the youngest of their four children was four years old, Anne resumed her scientific pursuits, obtaining a PhD in Cell Biology from UBC in 1982, and holding teaching and research positions until one of her children was seriously injured in a car accident late in 1966. Thinking he would need years of specialized care, she gave up academia and decided to take up painting as a full time career. As it turned out, her son made a miraculous recovery within two months, but Anne resolved to continue with her art.
She has enjoyed many private and public exhibitions of her work over the years since 1987, with numerous sales and commissions. Her paintings of UBC buildings have been on the covers of two issues of the UBC Alumni magazine. In 1993, along with the artist wife of one of Robert's mathematics colleagues, Anne founded the co-operative artists group “Artists in our Midst” which presents open studios events on three weekends each spring on the west side of Vancouver.
Anne works on paper with ink, watercolour, gouache, and collage, and occasionally with acrylic on canvas, paper, and driftwood. Subjects have included streetscapes and interesting buildings, still life, creatures of the sea, abstract landscapes, abstract interpretation of music, histological designs based on images as seen under a microscope, botanical illustrations including portraits of wildflowers, berries, and weeds, and driftwood gardens made of brightly coloured pieces of driftwood assembled into “floral arrangements.” During 2001 Anne completed a series of twenty-six mandalas for “An ABC Book of Invertebrates.”
During the latter part of the 1990s, Anne, who was previously highly articulate, began to notice some difficulty with speaking, especially word-finding. As the condition worsened, it became obvious to her family that something was wrong, but the diagnosis of Primary Progressive Aphasia (PPA) was not made until early 2002. The dementia has progressed to the stage where Anne finds it very difficult to convey meaning verbally (in speech or writing) and has some difficulty understanding the verbal communication of others. In April, 2004, the diagnosis of PPA was confirmed during a five-day visit to the Memory and Aging Center at the University of California, San Francisco. Notwithstanding her disability, the quality and quantity of Anne's artwork has not suffered in the slightest. See http://members.shaw.ca/adms for more samples of Anne's art, including the entire ABC Book of Invertebrates.
Robert A. Adams
Professor Emeritus of Mathematics
University of British Columbia
(All artwork and written content has been consented by family member or legal guardian)
The New York Times
A Disease That Allowed Torrents of Creativity
By SANDRA BLAKESLEE
If Rod Serling were alive and writing episodes for ?The Twilight Zone,?
odds are he would have leaped on the true story of Anne Adams, a
Canadian scientist turned artist who died of a rare brain disease last
year.
Trained in mathematics, chemistry and biology, Dr. Adams left her career
as a teacher and bench scientist in 1986 to take care of a son who had
been seriously injured in a car accident and was not expected to live.
But the young man made a miraculous recovery. After seven weeks, he
threw away his crutches and went back to school.
According her husband, Robert, Dr. Adams then decided to abandon science
and take up art. She had dabbled with drawing when young, he said in a
recent telephone interview, but now she had an intense all-or-nothing
drive to paint.
?Anne spent every day from 9 to 5 in her art studio,? said Robert Adams,
a retired mathematician. Early on, she painted architectural portraits
of houses in the West Vancouver, British Columbia, neighborhood where
they lived.
In 1994, Dr. Adams became fascinated with the music of the composer
Maurice Ravel, her husband recalled. At age 53, she painted ?Unravelling
Bolero? a work that translated the famous musical score into visual form.
Unbeknown to her, Ravel also suffered from a brain disease whose
symptoms were identical to those observed in Dr. Adams, said Dr. Bruce
Miller, a neurologist and the director of the Memory and Aging Center at
the University of California, San Francisco. Ravel composed ?Bolero? in
1928, when he was 53 and began showing signs of his illness with
spelling errors in musical scores and letters.
?Bolero? alternates between two main melodic themes, repeating the pair
eight times over 340 bars with increasing volume and layers of
instruments. At the same time, the score holds methodically to two
simple, alternating staccato bass lines.
? ?Bolero? is an exercise in compulsivity, structure and perseveration,?
Dr. Miller said. It builds without a key change until the 326th bar.
Then it accelerates into a collapsing finale.
Dr. Adams, who was also drawn to themes of repetition, painted one
upright rectangular figure for each bar of ?Bolero.? The figures are
arranged in an orderly manner like the music, countered by a zigzag
winding scheme, Dr. Miller said. The transformation of sound to visual
form is clear and structured. Height corresponds to volume, shape to
note quality and color to pitch. The colors remain unified until the
surprise key change in bar 326 that is marked with a run of orange and
pink figures that herald the conclusion.
Ravel and Dr. Adams were in the early stages of a rare disease called
FTD, or frontotemporal dementia
when they were working, Ravel on ?Bolero? and Dr. Adams on her painting
of ?Bolero,? Dr. Miller said. The disease apparently altered circuits in
their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts
and resulting in a torrent of creativity.
?We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely,? Dr. Miller said.
?Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that
when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may
release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one
part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become
stronger.?
Thus some patients with FTD develop artistic abilities when frontal
brain areas decline and posterior regions take over, Dr. Miller said.
An article by Dr. Miller and colleagues
describing how FTD can release new artistic talents was published online
in December 2007 by the journal Brain. FTD refers to a group of diseases
often misdiagnosed as Alzheimer?s disease
in that patients become increasingly demented, Dr. Miller said. But the
course and behavioral manifestations of FTD are different.
In the most common variant, patients undergo gradual personality
changes. They grow apathetic, become slovenly and typically gain 20
pounds. They behave like 3-year-olds in public, asking embarrassing
questions in a loud voice. All along, they deny anything is wrong.
Two other variants of FTD involve loss of language. In one, patients
have trouble finding words, Dr. Miller said. When someone says to the
patients, ?Pass the broccoli,? they might reply, ?What is broccoli??
In another, PPA or primary progressive aphasia, the spoken-language
network disintegrates. Patients lose the ability to speak.
All three variants share the same underlying pathology. The disease,
which has no cure, can progress quickly or, as in the case of Senator
Pete V. Domenici
Republican of New Mexico, who announced his retirement last fall because
of an FTD diagnosis, over many years.
Dr. Adams and Ravel had the PPA variant, Dr. Miller said.
From 1997 until her death 10 years later, Dr. Adams underwent periodic
brain scans that gave her physicians remarkable insights to the changes
in her brain.
?In 2000, she suddenly had a little trouble finding words,? her husband
said. ?Although she was gifted in mathematics, she could no longer add
single digit numbers. She was aware of what was happening to her. She
would stamp her foot in frustration.?
By then, the circuits in Dr. Adams?s brain had reorganized. Her left
frontal language areas showed atrophy. Meanwhile, areas in the back of
her brain on the right side, devoted to visual and spatial processing,
appeared to have thickened.
When artists suffer damage to the right posterior brain, they lose the
ability to be creative, Dr. Miller said. Dr. Adams?s story is the
opposite. Her case and others suggest that artists in general exhibit
more right posterior brain dominance. In a healthy brain, these areas
help integrate multisensory perception. Colors, sounds, touch and space
are intertwined in novel ways. But these posterior regions are usually
inhibited by the dominant frontal cortex, he said. When they are
released, creativity emerges.
Dr. Miller has witnessed FTD patients become gifted in landscape design,
piano playing, painting and other creative arts as their disease
progressed.
Dr. Adams continued to paint until 2004, when she could no longer hold a
brush. Her art, including ?An ABC Book of Invertebrates,? a rendering of
the mathematical ratio pi, an image of a migraine
aura and other works, is at two Web sites: members.shaw.ca/adms
No comments:
Post a Comment