Dr. Peter Schmid
I feel that the pursuit of education is kind of part of our upbringing. It’s within our personality as physicians. It’s a very strong societive intellect and after experiencing the excitement and seeing the connection between artwork and surgical work and corrective surgery, a light went off and I said, I want to share this with others, so it was important to master the technique of 3-dimensional art before I could take those steps forward to want to train other people. There is quite a deficiency in our training, especially in the aesthetics or the plastics where we don’t get formal art training in our curriculum and my feeling was here we go, we are working on appearance, we are working on improvement, we are trying to rejuvenate, but we’ve had no backing in aesthetics or beauty or art. So I really feel that this integration in introducing the world to art within our work is crucial. It is a challenge because we have to take that person back to their infancy. We have to take them back to understanding of the basis for construction of the human body and then bring forward and progress them forward so they actually can see this descriptive of what we are trying to see, what we are trying to see in the actual shape and form of the human body and the muscle and shape.
The overall mission at physicians coming to this course should be to improve their understanding of harmony and beauty. We all have to kind of strip our ego back and look at our work, look at our training, and look at our eye objectively and that’s what’s very difficult as someone that is a very busy physician, has a lot of responsibility. But we need to have someone look at what we’re actually looking at aesthetically. So the process is to retrain the eye to improve the observational skills of the doctor by using artistic principles. Artistic principles of basics and techniques, and it’s really interesting because you look at Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo. They sought out the body to study anatomy to improve their work. Just like physicians, we’ve worked around cadavers all our life, but we haven’t been used to working on the human being and observing it another perspective of shape and form. So the big layer of teaching this harmony and beauty is to go back and restudy the human body by training in aesthetic anatomy. Aesthetic anatomy is going from the structure outward to understand why there is a shape, why there is a form, why there is this blink response that we have to beauty. And we all know beauty and sense it emotionally when it walks in the room, but we now have to understand how is it constructed and created. This course goes back to the basics of the body from the structural, to the soft tissue, to the surface, to the reflective lights, to shape and form and contour, and how do we capture that. The biggest instrument for this is working in 3-dimensional sculpting because we actually can take a piece of amorphous clay and take it and shape it into shape and form. And this is very important because every time you touch the clay there is a relationship, there is a connection, different identities of form sense are going off, and so that’s what the experience is in this, is this experience of delving into this 3-dimensional work with art and then making those connections and translations into our own personal work. What this will ultimately achieve is first, understanding the individual characteristics of someone that walks is, so the muse is almost like the patient. We have to get into the heart of the muse, we have to get into the heart of our patient, and that’s the critical concern you have to take as a physician. You have to understand the personalities of your patients, just like we have to get into the heart of the muse. The muse becomes that motivation like your patient and then you start looking at the structural component, so we are inspired by each other. But the important thing is that we understand the expectation. With clay, you create an expectation in yourself, but you become very critical, but that’s the learning process. Why we go through this labor and why do we go through this challenge is to really understand shape and form, and then apply it to our work, the ultimate goal being to improve our artistic planning on the patient, thus to improve our surgical outcomes.
But for the novice, we really invite the novice into the studio. The atelier so to speak. We open our doors. We are there for concern. I’ve surrounding myself with a group of very caring individuals that understand art and understand human emotion, they understand humanity. But it’s to bring the stranger into the studio and make them feel comfortable. I do agree, at times sculpting can be more challenging than actual surgery because you are taking something that started from a block of clay and you bring it into something that has emotional meaning. But these challenges are very important. These challenges allow for personal growth and Malvina Hoffman once said, she is a famous sculptor, she said, you actually develop a sixth sense. And I believe that when you walk life, when you integrate life, when you practice it daily, when you see a patient there is something that communicates with you immediately on shape and form that just immediately meets the eye and you feel like you can correct. This course teaches about proportion. It teaches about relationships. It teaches about asymmetry and how we can make challenges of asymmetry look better. It teaches about human shape and form, the individual shape and form of a patient, and it also brings your eyes into a new perspective when you look at the patient.
What I’ve found that’s been very eye opening in my practice and being a sculptor is, and I’m not talking about abstract sculpting, I am talking about sculpting to where we are trying to assimilate or reproduce or create a personality of some muse in front of us, but in my practice, patients seek me out because I’m an artist. They seek out my work because I’m an artist. They know that with an artistic eye you look at the entire image of the human being differently and I do feel that yes, we are working with a preexisting or existing structural form, the patient. Adding an artistic element to this can take that correction, that help, that assistance, that care to the patient to a higher level. Art builds another layer of trust between you and the patient. It allows for communication, it opens a new dialogue, there is a new language you have with the patient. Also at a level that they can understand. When you start describing shape and form in their own features in a very artistic simplistic language and this is very important because we have to not only see through the eyes of an artist, but we have to see through the eyes of our patient and we have to reverse our motion and our mind so we have this commensurate connection between the two of us, so that we can come to be best outlook. Also, the artistic approach creates a boundary. It creates boundaries with human nature and human nature is our template for beauty. But what is important is that we don’t distort, or deform, or destroy beauty, so we want to bring out the best beauty possible in patients and that takes an artistic element within my means.
Sculpting for Surgeons creates a legacy for learning the human body through an artistic path. It is an experience where a physician or anybody interested would want to think outside the box. It’s an opportunity to grow and find personal growth in yourself. We never stop learning until the day we die and if you look at the best surgeons and the surgeons that are colleagues of mine, the ones that are excellent surgeons that are masters and we look at master artists, we continue to aspire, we continue to grow, we continue to change. If we sit on our techniques and we don’t individualize care, then we deliver a sense of mediocracy and we want to go to a higher level with the patient and the work we do and the responsibilities we bring to the table, so Sculpting for Surgeons can open the doors to have you grow beyond and improve the artistic intellect and the intellect for shape and form.
For a surgeon, our lives revolve around technique and its very similar to clay. There is a certain technique you have to build up the armature and build up the clay.
You spend endless hours studying and learning. Learning technique. Trying to produce reproducible safe results. When it comes to art and integrating art it can take those results to a higher level. And yes, there is the healing factor with surgery, but there is also the control we now learn through some of our advanced instrumentation is that we actually can now visualize and control the definition that we are trying to emit on the surface. What sculpting has done for me, is when I go into the operative suite I am continually thinking 3-dimensionally. I am looking at the patient even at the time of surgery 3-dimensionally and positionally what I want to achieve underneath the skin. For instance, I am going to do a facelift. I want to bring out shape, form, angulation. But I want a complementary angulation to the patient’s body type and status and it takes lifting the tissue in certain directions, putting certain tensions and dispositions onto the tissue to create the best outcome. Additionally, it’s not want you take, it’s what you leave behind in that balance. So going to the operative suite with a cannula, for instance, and to reshape the body we go under the skin now and we are thinking anatomically. We are thinking about how can I accentuate this muscle? How can I re-accentuate this aesthetic line? How can I create a better shape? How can I control the proportions better? How can I make the proportions complement what the patient wants and what their body type is? So it is a different intellectual level that we are going with the thinking of the hands. We used to use the thinking hand more as a safety and more as a measure of thickness, but now we are going in with both thinking hands and we are thinking out, I am contouring out this muscle, I am contouring out this shape, just as if I am laying clay onto the sculpture. We also utilize additive techniques as we use an additive technique in clay. There is different techniques, sculpting in marble or plaster you are doing a subtractive technique. You are taking a block and you are emitting the form out, very similar to our renaissance sculptors. With the additive technique we are adding up, but the disposition what happens is it changes the inner relationships every time you apply clay it’s going to affect the shape and the form of the adjacent structure. Similarly, when we use clay in surgery which is usually fat or transplantation, we are using those techniques to recreate human shape and form very similar to 3-dimension so it’s a very 3-dimensional work. So there is a great translation and language you can have between the studio and the surgical suite which are ongoing.
How does this work with Vaser?
An example of a technique that has taken my work to a higher level is ultrasonic liposuction. One limitation that I found when I am trying to reproduce shape and form is the cannula speaks so much. The cannula really is your sculpting technique, the cannula is like a wire loop. We take down clay, we go under the skin with a cannula and this is how we are reshaping form. But one of the limitations we have found is first off, how do I get more definition and control. I have used Vaser liposuction as that instrument that allows me to first go in. I have to tighten the canvas, so it’s almost like a painting. A painting when you do art restoration is you look at the canvas, you look at the frame, you look at the component of pain. In surgery, our canvas is the skin. Is the skin tight, is the canvas tight, do I have to relate to that? Ultrasonic liposuction gives you a component of contracture. And there are other instruments now that do contract that tissue down so that’s the first thing I look at is the canvas. Then I also look at the structure and how I’m going to change the structure. Ultrasonic liposuction has allowed me to go closer to the skin with ease and to go in and begin to start contouring out shape before I come in with the cannula. It’s the cannula that you come in then and you start bringing out the shape of form. You’re kind of unfolding this beauty of underneath the canvas of the skin. The technology that we have today allows us this control, this precision. Safety is also a large component, but also a reproducible result unique to each individual.
What’s also extremely important when you work on human form is you must understand the lines of beauty in the body. The shape and the form must be understood 3-dimensionally. And when we work on a patient like we work on a sculpture, we are working around the entire peripheral aspect and we must look at that. There is a kind of Gestalt principle that goes with art. We are looking at the holistic component of it. We also have to imply those principles into the surgical suite. We are looking at the whole body. We want to see what’s called in art rhythm, harmony or flow to our patient. So we want what we would perform on a patient just like a sculpture. We want it to sing to us, we want it to compliment itself, we want this outcome that really boosters the beauty in that patient and the aesthetics in that patient. So it takes understanding the line. It takes understanding masculinity, femininity, an androgynous type of appearance, so we know where to connect and control shape and form that will express these different gender or idealisms or specifics in the human body. Proportion is very important when it comes to planning, when it comes to trying to achieve an aesthetic result. And proportion is also a balance of taking away, putting back, preserving and also looking at the entire whole, so we are creating that continuity, that rhythm of flow throughout the body.
If you we were to judge whether a student had left your workshop and you were to judge whether it was a successful interaction with this particular student, how would you be able to judge. What would you expect from that student?
First off, I thinks it’s what I see in their eyes. When a student leaves a workshop and you see that enthusiasm and that light that’s gone off, it’s almost like an aha moment that they have, this revealing, you know. You see the energy in the student once they have achieved something different or taken another step along that artistic ladder in their path. Also, what’s very exciting for me is to see someone that comes in and they look at clay and some wire and you put a model in front of them and say you are going to sculpt that. And they’re overwhelmed and to take them through that process with a select amount of time, to have them come out with a product that has beauty to them, has connection, has emotion, and you see that pride, that’s when you know you’ve accomplished what you’ve set out for with the patient. I also have physician students, cosmetic plastic aesthetic surgeons, contact me after the workshop and I think it takes time to digest all this information. It’s very, very overwhelming. Sculpting is a process. First, like surgery, you have to deal with the technique, you’ve got to learn the architecture underneath to maintain the form and the shape and the viability of your sculpture. But once they’ve accomplished that technique, then you can become creative. Then you can start looking at creating style in my work and how I’m going to stylize this work to my patient so we have kind of a communion of a good outcome. But doctors will come back after this course and I’ll get a thank you, and that is so gratifying to know that you’ve put your heart and your energy into your student, and you know they care and you know that they’ve walked away or they’ve learned something from it. Some of the gratification of teaching these students isn’t immediate. Gratification comes later when you know they’ve taken these principles and believed it. You’ve got to live it, you’ve got to walk it to understand it. But once you’ve integrated this into your surgical practice and see the results, it’s that moment, that feedback. And it’s always that moment postoperatively that when we apply something new, when we unveil it a week later or 3 months later, did it follow what I was guiding shape and form to do. And that’s very exciting so the true compliment is when doctors want to come back to learn more and they’ve gotten the connection. They are understanding the translations beneath the skin to the surface and how they’ve affected positively that shape and form, that negative space, that reflection of light and created something in their own surgical outcomes.
