Jeff Sugar, MD
Jeff Sugar
What are you looking at? Now, pause to examine whatever platform holds these words or any other nearby object. Now look a full 180° behind. Now look at the sides. Notice how the same object might appear simple and clean from one point of view, but complicated and messy from another. Seen all together, the changes from these shifting perspectives are not surprising. Magicians performing close-up card tricks can’t escape the laws of physics. Yet when the missing card is pulled from the magician’s empty hand, we find the illusion astonishing. Sometimes the greatest surprise is the one we do see coming.
The figurative and the abstract mobiles I make each present to the viewer a set of objects from multiple perspectives. Time is often considered a fourth dimension, adding duration to the three dimensions of space. What, then do we get when we add motion—that implies the dimension of time—to a flat mobile, previously at rest? Does the two-dimensional mobile become three-dimensional, or three plus, because the parts together are no longer flat and the mobile changes with time? And what is time but the perception of change—the change from winter to spring, child to adult, the position of one clock-hand—or one mobile—moving from one configuration to another?
While still in elementary school, I found my first intellectual and artistic hero: Leonardo da Vinci. He wrote of the need to see clearly and to notice “the art in science and the science in art.” Leonardo’s famous image of the naked Vitruvian Man, who stands in the center of a square inscribed inside a circle, exemplifies this unified duality. The precise lines of the geometric shapes and the exactness of the body placement suggest an elegant science experiment. At the same time, the central figure is lithe and expressive, and the entire image exhibits rare beauty. Science and art are not in opposition, but rather, reinforce each other.
At an early age, I decided to pursue more than one path. At the age of seven, I made pencil versions of Flintstone characters (Fred and Barney; later Wilma, Betty, Dino and Pebbles), while I also wondered how the human body worked, why we needed to sleep, and what were we here for anyway?
My first public presentation of art was a mobile of brightly colored posterboard hands, each demonstrating a different gesture. It hung from the ceiling in a junior high art show. On a nearby wall hung one of my oil paintings, depicting a crossroad and buildings painted on the left in cold blues and whites, while on the right the roads were bright yellows, oranges and reds and buildings were painted with flames reaching from inside to out. Before the show concluded, both of these pieces were stolen. Years later, an older artist friend suggested that someone’s wanting these pieces badly enough to steal them could be seen as an unusual and dramatic compliment.
My day job as a Child and Adult Psychiatrist is predicated on the belief that people can—and do—change. As the mystic poet Rumi said, “When grapes turn to wine, they long for our ability to change.” We exist simultaneously as physical, emotional, thinking, and spiritual beings. These are not hierarchical levels but interdependent modes of experience, each mode affecting all the others.
In my teens and twenties, considering a career, I felt compelled to make art, but equally strong was my passion to understand the mind and how it sometimes faltered. Yet the mind could not be fully understood without learning its relationship to the body. The only way to do that would be to endure medical school and become a psychiatrist. Medicine itself—fixing ill or broken bodies—is a noble pursuit but didn’t get to what I thought was the core purpose of being alive. The Meaning of Life must concern the connection to something larger than ourselves.
After nearly 35 years of psychiatric practice, I still find this to be true. But now I place increased value on artistic expression. Great art speaks to something deep within us—whether the object is a Van Gogh portrait, a Pollock “Action Painting,” or one of Calder’s mobiles.
The tension between change and permanence, the ephemeral and the eternal, informs both my art and my psychiatric practice. Although our culture often views any activity outside a limited area of expertise as a “waste of time,” I believe that the sincere pursuit of more than one discipline brings fresh insights. We think of improvising music and art, but the same practice of “listening with fresh ears,” or “seeing with fresh eyes,” can lead to medical and scientific insights as well. Throughout my career I have sketched from life to keep myself grounded while attending to people in a room, and I doodled cartoons for amusement. Both of these skills—seeing what is there and imagining what is not—have served me well as I have worked to relieve my patients’ emotional pain.
In the last six years I have returned to making mobiles—like the mobile that I made from cardboard when I was fourteen, depicting a man jumping with a parachute with both arms swept back, one arm entirely formed by negative space. I make my mobiles now from steel and aluminum, and I cut them in a metal shop. I have continued to make at least one body part from negative space. Most of my mobiles are figurative, pieces suspended with fishing line to allow each to spin freely. Some mobiles are completely abstract, still employing distinct positive and negative space. Recently, I have begun using Computer Assisted Drawing (CAD) files sent directly to professional metal shops where laser cutters make the pieces. This allowed me to make a mobile during COVID, when I didn’t have personal access to metal-working tools. I produced a mobile of two Capoeira figures facing off in combat that now hangs in a collector’s Brazilian restaurant. The CAD method will allow making numbered editions and easily changing the scale.
To explore the way color literally moves through space, my current work involves powder coating and fabricating mobiles from acrylic to create shifting and overlapping color fields. These will enhance the conditions for what I call, Controlled Serendipity.
The first time I see one of my newly completed mobiles, hanging from a ceiling high enough for all the shapes to spin freely, I am always surprised. Just like watching the magician’s empty hands at the moment they reveal the missing card.