The Art of Rheumatoid Arthritis
Georgette Chen was born as Chang Li Ying and was the fourth of 12 children. The wealthy family lived in Zhejiang Province, China. She received her art education in Paris, New York, and Shanghai.
She inherited rheumatoid arthritis from her father, Zhang Renjie (Chang Sen Chek), who suffered from a form of arthritis and later developed an eye condition which eventually required him to wear dark glasses. Zhang's disease crippled one of his feet giving him a lurching gait. As her RA became worse, she had relied on cortisone for relief (15 years) and began gold salt injections along with herbs such as snake wine and root of tree - for wind. In 1970 her health was quickly deteriorating having long attacks of RA. |
Georgette Chen
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Still Life with Durians, Mangosteens and Rambutans
Georgette Chen died of complications from Rheumatoid arthritis at Mount Alvernia Hospital.
She was awarded the Singapore Cultural Medallion in 1982. Settling in Singapore in 1954, she taught at the Nanyang Academy of Fine Arts until her retirement in 1980. The Worlds of Georgette Chen features a three-part docudrama based on her life and her contribution to the development of the birth of the Nanyang art style in Singapore. |
Renoir portrayed the French actress and model, Jeanne Samary in the painting entitled
"La Reverie". 1877 Renoir acquired Rheumatoid Arthritis around age 50 (1892). In 1897 after being diagnosed, he sought treatment but it was crude and unsuccessful as the disease spread beyond the joints to affect the skin, nerves, blood vessels, and even the internal organs.
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Pierre Auguste Renoir
France 1841-1919 France (d. 78)
In 1908 he developed a debilitating hernia and had a stroke. He regained some movement back in 1912 and continued to paint. It was love that kept him living life to its fullest, the love of his work and his
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Woman with a Yellow Turban, 1917. Later Years Impressionism. Private Collection.
family who cared for him when he became disabled. Gilles Bourdos, documented his life in a film entitled Renoir. His collection consist of over 1600 many of which are held in private collections. |
Frederic Edwin Church
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In 1860 Church married Isabel Carnes. They suffered a terrible loss when their two infant children died of diphtheria. During a six-month period of recovery, the couple lived in Jamaica.
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The following year, their son Frederic Joseph was born, the first of four children who would survive into adulthood.
At the age of 50 (1876), illness began to affect Church's output. Having rheumatoid arthritis, he eventually began to paint with his left hand and continued to produce works although on a much slower pace. He devoted much of his energies during the final 20 years of his life to his house in Olana. Read more |
John Pickering MRBS
England 1934-2016 England (d.82)
At the age of 26, after a sudden traumatic injury to his elbow joint which resulted after a fall off of his bicycle, he was later diagnosed as having Rheumatoid arthritis. In the early stages he had about half a dozen operations on his hands which doctors hoped would ease the pain as the joints became increasingly twisted and disfigured.
He was also treated with steroids in the late Fifties and early Sixties to reduce the swelling of the joints. Like most treatments for rheumatoid arthritis there was an improvement but then the benefit gets less and less as your body gets used to the medication. Read More |
Zhang Cuiying
pseudonym Zhang Caixing Shanghai, China 1962 - present Falun Dafa practitioner and Chinese artist This is the true story of Zhang Cuiying, a Falun Dafa practitioner and one of the world's finest contemporary classical Chinese painters.
Zhang Cuiying was born into a poor family where no one could have predicted that she would become a celebrated artist.
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In 1985, she married and later gave birth to a daughter. In 1991 the family moved to Australia.
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Like other immigrants in Australia, Zhang found a job, packing frozen vegetables. Her health deteriorated by 1997 to the point she could not even raise a tea cup and had to completely give up painting. After having seen all the doctors for her Rheumatoid Arthritis and spending thousands in medical expenses, she could not be cured and the condition became worse. Read More
Zhang was introduced to exercises and meditations as a way to treat the severe rheumatoid arthritis she had been suffering from since the age of 34. She credits Falun Gong for her complete recovery and has been promoting its healing capabilities all over the world. (1) |
Raoul Dufy
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Dufy continued to take steroids but experience the side effects that now make steroid therapy a stopgap, rather than the cure it was initially thought to be. After the treatment, Dufy, although not cured, was well enough to return to France and to continue painting until his death in 1953. The side effects of the drugs contributed to his death three years latter.
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Dufy (Photo by Nick De Morgoli/Pix Inc./Time Life Pictures/Getty Images)
In 1963, the National Museum of Modern Art acquired a significant number of Dufy's works when his widow left a legacy to the nation. This collection comprising of more than 130 items are items he chose not to sell to collectors.
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She began her artistic career by selling hand-drawing Christmas cards. In 1933 the cards sold for twenty five cents each. Her passion for the art blossomed as she grew, seeking larger and diverse canvases she painted on various surfaces such as pulp boards, cookie sheets, masonite, there were no limitations. Learn more:
Maud Lewis: A World Without Shadows |
Maud Lewis
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Between 1945-1950, people began to stop at Maud's home to buy her paintings for two or three dollars. Only in the last three or four years of Maud's life did her paintings begin to sell for seven to ten dollars. She achieved national attention as a result of an article in the "Star Weekly" in 1964 and in 1965 she was featured on CBC-TV's Telescope . Unfortunately, her arthritis deprived her from completing many of the orders that resulted from the national exposure.
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Edward Burra
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He continued to be obsessed with his work to the exclusion of all else, explaining in a rare moment of candor that the only time he was not in pain was when he was painting. In a filmed interview given towards the end of his life, Burra declared, or rather drawled, "I think you ought to work, to paint. Otherwise, if you don't do enough painting, what's the point of it all?" He died in 1976 at the age of 72 having lived far longer – and triumphantly – than anyone could possibly have predicted.
A gift is bestowed for those that see.
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Nancy Spero. 2014. oil on board.
by Victoria Miro. London. Nancy Spero was born in Cleveland, Ohio, in 1926 to a family with a Jewish background. A year later, her family moved to Chicago, where Spero remained until age 23. Her father, Henry Spero was a dealer of used print-presses and like so many fathers was apparently indifferent to her decision to become an artist.
After graduating from High School, she attended the Art Institute of Chicago, where she met her future husband, painter Leon Golub. Spero graduated in 1949 and spent the following year in Paris. |
Nancy Spero
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From the late 1980s until the early 2000s, Spero had installed installation pieces all across the world.
In the final decades of her life she experimented with textiles and installation. Prestigious public art commissions came her way: for instance, the lavish, glittering mosaic murals that since 2001 have adorned the subway station under New York's Lincoln Center. Her pieces varied in mood from lacerating and shocking to playful, comical and celebratory, but for most of her career she grappled with that brutally simple, tortuously difficult question: in the face of so much cruelty and suffering in the world, what are an artist's ethical and political responsibilities. |
Self Portrait with Yellow Lilies, 1907
Natalia Goncharova was born in the town of Nagaevo in the Tula Province in Russia to an elite Russian family. Her father, Sergei Goncharov, worked as an architect. Goncharova's mother, Ekaterina Il'ichna Beliaeva came from a family that had been musically influential. In 1892, when Goncharova was eleven, her father moved the family to Moscow in search of greater financial opportunities.
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Natalia Goncharova
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Jews. The Shabbat
Goncharova suffered badly with arthritis in her hands and it is said that to carry on painting she had to tie the paint brushes to her wrist. During the 1950's, despite the fact that severe arthritis, she continued to paint and sought inspiration from current events. In the mid to late 1950s she painted a series entitled Outer Space, inspired by the Russian space program. Goncharova died in 1962 after a long struggle with severe rheumatoid arthritis. Read More:2, 3.
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Most of his work in the gallery collection was done in the last three years of the artist's life although a few pieces are dated from the early as the 1970s
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Joseph Hardin
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Alexej von Jawlensky was born in Torzhok, a town in Tver Governorate, Russia, as the fifth child of Georgi von Jawlensky and his wife Alexandra (née Medwedewa). At the age of ten he moved with his family to Moscow. In 1889 Jawlensky gave up an established career in the Russian Imperial Guard to study painting.
Between 1917 and 1919 Jawlensky created a series of Heads known as the Mystical Heads From 1918-1935 he painted the ,"Abstract Heads' series, where he regarded the human face as the sign of an inner vision. His last series, The ‘Meditations‘ are the crown of Jawlensky’s lifework, with them he had finally found his style, they are unmistakable his very own work. |
Alexej von Jawlensky
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In 1924 Jawlensky joined Kandinsky, Paul Klee, and Lyonel Feininger in forming a short-lived association called Der Blaue Vier (“The Blue Four”). He exhibited with them for some years, but in the 1930s crippling arthritis limited his ability to paint. After 1937, his Rheumatoid Arthritis led to total paralysis.
His works are among the most prized works of classical modernity and can be found in major museums around the world. |
The son of Charles, a well-to-do builder and contractor, and Sarah Aldin, Cecil had an interest for sketching animals and the countryside. He left school at the age of sixteen and enrolled in the Royal College of Art.
At the age of 20, Aldin developed rheumatic fever and in the same year sold his first drawing, which appeared in The Building News of 12 September 1890.[2] This was followed by a dog show picture purchased by The Graphic in 1891.[1] Aldin suffered from rheumatoid arthritis, aggravated by falls in the hunting field, which forced him to give up the sport.[3] |
Cecil Charles Windsor Aldin
England 1870 - 1935 England (d. 64)
One of the leading spirits in the renaissance of British sporting art. His serious and exacting portrayal of scenes of hunting, racing and horse portraiture is among the finest in British Sporting Art. Aldin was the Master South Berkshire Hunt. He was elected a member of the Royal Society of British Artists in 1898. |
A prolific painter, Aldin is known in particular for his sporting art, sensitive depictions of dogs, horses, and hunting scenes in the English countryside. His gaming images such as Chess & Whist are now considered scarce and highly collectable. He was successful and admired in his own time, as a writer and illustrator of books and magazines, his images becoming more popular with the passage of time. “Cecil Aldin can justly be described as one of the leading spirits in the renaissance of British sporting art” (Alan Horne, The Dictionary of 20th Century British Book Illustrators, p. 67).
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National Museum of Health and Medicine
Visitors will enter the new "Visibly Human" gallery after passing by the skeleton of Peter Cluckey, a Spanish-American War veteran who suffered from a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis, which fused many of his joints together. Cluckey is a mainstay of the Museum’s historic human body exhibits and has been on display nearly continuously for decades. The exhibit also includes an interactive installation titled the Visible Human Project, in which cross sections of the human body can be examined at a station in the gallery.こ
Visitors will enter the new "Visibly Human" gallery after passing by the skeleton of Peter Cluckey, a Spanish-American War veteran who suffered from a severe form of rheumatoid arthritis, which fused many of his joints together. Cluckey is a mainstay of the Museum’s historic human body exhibits and has been on display nearly continuously for decades. The exhibit also includes an interactive installation titled the Visible Human Project, in which cross sections of the human body can be examined at a station in the gallery.こ
Storm glasses would eventually rise in popularity in the mid-1800s after British Naval Officer Admiral Robert Fitzroy used them aboard the HMS Beagle, which also happened to host a young Charles Darwin doing his initial research on evolution. This is why the storm glass is often called an Admiral Fitzroy Storm Glass.
You will need a glass container that is seal-able.
Wood for the base. Epoxy Glue to bond the glass to the base. 2 Beakers to mix chemicals in Chemicals to make the storm glass contents are: 2.5 g potassium nitrate 2.5 g ammonium chloride 33 mL distilled water 40 mL ethanol 10 g camphor (natural not synthetic) |
Admiral Fitzroy observations were thus:
-If the liquid in the glass is clear, the weather will be bright and clear. -If the liquid is cloudy, the weather will be cloudy as well, perhaps with precipitation. -If there are small dots in the liquid, humid or foggy weather can be expected. -A cloudy glass with small stars indicates thunderstorms. -If the liquid contains small stars on sunny winter days, then snow is coming. -If there are large flakes throughout the liquid, it will be overcast in temperate seasons or snowy in the winter. -If there are crystals at the bottom, this indicates frost. -If there are threads near the top, it will be windy. |
In a sealed glass, he mixed potassium nitrate, ammonium chloride, ethanol, camphor and water, and created the storm glass. https://www.instructables.com/id/Fitzroy-Storm-Glass/
Click for 2017 Statistic on RA
Historical Perspective on the Etiology of Rheumatoid Arthritis (nih.gov) https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3119866/ Historical Perspective on the Etiology of Rheumatoid Arthritis Pouya Entezami In June 1995, at the 13th European Congress of Rheumatolo... - Google Scholar |