THE ART OF THE SCAR

THE ART OF THE SCAR
Seeing Illness Through Lived Experience
Exclusive Interview with Ted Meyer
Featured in 'Innerviews'
Hosted by Allié McGuire

​Ted Meyer is an internationally recognized artist and patient advocate whose work transforms lived experiences of illness into powerful visual storytelling that builds empathy and human connection. Living with Gaucher disease, he bridges art and medicine through projects like Scarred for Life, helping audiences and medical professionals see illness through the lens of lived humanity.

ALLIÉ: Before the galleries, the lectures, and the advocacy, who were you, Ted? A young artist learning to live in a body shaped by illness, and what did creating art give you that medicine couldn’t?

TED: Well, I think we should start way back. I was in and out of the hospital as a kid from the time I was about five. I would do drawings in the hospital. I have pictures of me in my hospital bed with my art supplies on the little crank-up table next to me. I would always draw in there. One of the volunteers at the hospital came in one day. I was in a really bad mood, and I don’t know what I was drawing, a spaceship or something you would draw back then.

​She said, “If you don’t like it here, you can draw that you don’t like it here. You can put a Band-Aid in your drawing and put an IV tube in it.” So that’s sort of who I was. I was this kid who was a return patient at the hospital. That was my three to four times a year. I had my family at home, and I had my family of nurses at the hospital. I did art in both places.

The times when I wasn’t sick, I have something called Gaucher disease, which is an enzyme deficiency. Sometimes I was fine, and sometimes I would have terrible bone pain where I would have to go to the hospital and they would just sedate me. So I had this bifurcated life of long stretches in the hospital and then seeming like a normal kid. So that’s who I was.

​ALLIÉ: That’s who you were. So living with this disease of yours, like you just said, pain, procedures, I can’t imagine how many, and a deep awareness of your body early in your life. At what point did that lived experience stop feeling like something to endure and start becoming something you could transform through your work? How was art a therapy for you?

TED: Well, just being able to draw about it. But it wasn’t until later in life when I started doing paintings about what was going on in my body. I started doing these contorted skeletons. I started doing angry little figures because it was a period after college where my health really crashed. It was very bad. So I did a lot of work at that point about what was going on with me.

When I give lectures, I always talk about patient art as patient-centered. It’s self-centered, but not in a narcissistic way. As you know, doing these interviews and for everyone who reads or watches this, when you are a patient, it takes so much energy to be sick. I always say it makes sense that you would do artwork about yourself because that’s what’s on your mind all the time. How to navigate your body, how to live in your body, how to deal with the world with a non-functioning body. So all that artwork at that point was about that.

Then when I was 42, NIH, your tax dollars at work, by the way, thanks everybody, came up with the treatment for what I have. They developed an enzyme replacement. I had gone to NIH when I was six years old to give bone marrow for something I didn’t get treatment for until I was 42. Once that happened, my artwork completely changed. It was colorful and bright, there were other people, it was funny, it was sensual. It was everything my early artwork wasn’t. It wasn’t about me anymore, it was about the outside world.

That was the transition that led me to advocate for other patients because I still wanted to do work about illness, but I couldn’t do it about myself anymore. So I started finding artists who were doing work like I had done and started getting them shows and speaking engagements so they could get their stories out.

ALLIÉ: As someone who lives with MS, I can say sometimes it’s like you just don’t have words for things. Did you find that helpful, that you didn’t have to express what was going on with words, but you could use something else?

TED: Yeah. It would be funny because I would do these little drawings and then every once in a while there would be a review in the LA Times or something, and they would talk about these angry little figures. I would think, I’m not angry, I just hurt. But that’s how the outside world would see it.

There are so many things about the lived experience that show up better in artwork than in a written essay. It’s funny because I’ve written a whole book about things going on with me throughout my life medically, but it’s a completely different kind of story. It’s more about observations of other people and how they dealt with medicine and me as a sick kid, whereas the paintings were just about me. I think writing has its place, and I think art has its place.

ALLIÉ: Let’s talk about Scars for Life. You ask people to reveal parts of themselves they’re often taught to hide. What happens in that moment when someone realizes that their scar is not a flaw, but a story worth honoring?

TED: Let’s talk about how Scars for Life started. I was showing some of my happier artwork at a gallery in Beverly Hills. A woman rolled in in a wheelchair with a low-back dress. This was before the Iraq war, so we weren’t used to seeing scars. We started talking about art. She had been a dancer and was trying to do choreography that included wheelchairs.

She looked at me and said, “You need to keep doing artwork about mobility issues because it’s still part of you, even if you can walk now.” It was such a simple thing, but it resonated with me. I had been feeling that while the happy artwork sold better, it didn’t feed my soul.

I called her the next day and asked if I could make a print of her back. I based it on Japanese fish prints. I thought if the scales of a fish can print, maybe a scar could print. I went to her house, printed her back, and showed it at a gallery. The reaction was unlike anything I had experienced before. People wanted to know about her. They would come up to me and show me their scars. They would unbutton shirts, lift skirts, pull down waistbands. Everyone wanted to tell me what they had been through and how they had survived.

​It became clear this work was touching people in a way my other work wasn’t. Over the years, I’ve done about a hundred of these. People write to me from all over the world. There’s something about making a print. It’s like a fingerprint. You ink the scar, pull the print, and there it is. Then I paint into it with details of what happened.

There’s something powerful about people taking that print, putting it on their wall, and saying, “That’s what I went through.” It becomes part of the healing process. It separates it from their body.

I also started realizing there’s a difference between when a doctor says you’re healed and when you feel healed. A doctor might say your bones are back together, but mentally and physically, you’re not fully there. Healing doesn’t have a clear end date. But by making a print and putting it on the wall, it gives people a moment they can define as their own. That’s how it started.

That led to working with universities like UCLA and USC. I created programs where I brought in patient artists and aligned their work with the medical curriculum so students could understand the lived experience of illness. We host lectures where artists and doctors are on stage together, discussing both the art and the medical perspective. It’s been an amazing experience.
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​ALLIÉ: It sounds amazing. I love how you speak about healing not being a single moment. It’s not just when someone says, “You’re all better.”

TED: My illness, I’m very healthy right now, but there isn’t a day I don’t think about it. My back, fatigue, hip replacements that need to be redone, anemia, no spleen. I’m as healthy as anyone my age, but I carry all these remnants from before treatment.

ALLIÉ: So when you bring your art into medical schools and hospitals, what do you see shift in students when art disrupts that clinical distance they’ve been trained to keep?

​TED: It’s interesting because I got into this right when medical schools started incorporating humanities. Some schools do simple things like taking students to museums to improve observation skills.

The challenge has been finding a way to measure the impact. At USC, students write reflections before they leave, and art is often mentioned. Sometimes specific patient stories stay with them. But we haven’t been able to track long-term outcomes yet. The students I first worked with are just now becoming practicing doctors. We hope to eventually ask them if this made them better physicians.

ALLIÉ: One last question. Looking at your body of work and the lives you’ve touched, what do you hope people carry with them about illness, resilience, and humanity long after they walk away?

TED: What I want people to realize is that artwork created by people like me, or anyone living with illness, speaks deeply to the human condition. It talks about strength, survival, trauma, and pain. None of it would exist if everyone were healthy. People would just be painting landscapes, their grandchildren, their dogs.

People like us have a completely different set of experiences to share. We have stories that are different from the general population. I honestly believe our artwork is better. Maybe not technically, but emotionally and in storytelling, it’s more human.

I was just at a big art fair in Palm Springs, and so much of the art was decorative. It wasn’t telling a story. Then you see artwork by patients, sometimes just simple figures, and you can feel the pain in it. You understand what that person is going through.

If that person had been healthy, they might not have been an artist at all. Illness has its downside, of course. We all wish we didn’t have it. But there is a motivation and a muse that comes out of illness that has produced some amazing things over the years. ∎

Learn more about Ted and his work online:
www.tedmeyer.com

Get his book ‘Scarred for Life’:
https://go.awarenowmedia.com/book/scarred-for-life