Norman Bethune is a famous Saranac Lake artist. His most celebrated work was created here, in the Trudeau Cottage Sanitarium, where he was both a doctor, and a patient. He was also an inventor: the Bethune shears, for thoracic surgery, are still in use today. He was a humanitarian: his many medical patents were donated to the cause of socialized medicine. He was an innovator: he organized the first mobile blood banks to save the lives of wounded soldiers.
He was a writer: publishing poems and short stories. He was a teacher: he founded an art school for poor children in Montreal and later trained paramedics in China so the people, not just their soldiers, could get medical care. Scene 1: Dawn courtesy of Historic Saranac Lake wiki website. Before this, however, he was a doctor, in his late 30's, with tuberculosis, and curing at the Trudeau Sanitarium. For such a highly driven, multi-talented person, the enforced rest of a tuberculosis cure must have been very difficult.
Perhaps that is why he channeled all his available energies into his most dramatic and extensive work in It was a scroll sixty feet in length, five feet tall at its highest point, painted with what looks like poster colors, and drawn in pencil.
He had no canvas, so he used brown wrapping paper from the Sanitarium laundry. He named it "TB's Progress. What we know of this work comes from Bethune's own notes in the Sanitarium journal, "The Fluoroscope," from August 15, By his own description, the first image now missing , was a drawing of his "prenatal existence. Mannerism is an intellectually sophisticated style with compositional tension and instability, known for a highly florid emotional palette.
It was a late Renaissance innovation of Michelangelo. Such works as the Sistine Chapel ceiling rely upon figures caught in motion, expressing emotional states, and interacting with abstract and artificial concepts that have been personified for the work.
