Sculpture class on a recent Wednesday night at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts looked a bit like an operating room. The bright white studio was filled with med students in green and blue scrubs.
Plastic surgery students from LSU and Tulane meticulously carved away at their work, not with scalpels, but with wooden sculpting tools.
Teacher Kim Bernadas pointed to the lips on a student’s clay bust.
“Men tend to have longer upper lips whereas females, it’s a little shorter. Also that philtrum area is narrower - that dark spot underneath the nose. So, there’s a lot of gender differences," Bernadas said.
Dr. Michael Moses, clinical professor in plastic surgery at Tulane and LSU, says the program started offering the class annually about ten years ago. He says it’s unusual -- he only knows of one or two others like it in the country.
“We decided that our plastic surgery residents needed to learn how to draw to communicate their ideas to patients and other plastic surgeons.”
Moses wishes he had had a chance to take a class like this in med school. Instead, he ended up paying to take private art classes because he thought it was so important.
Third-year LSU plastic surgery student, James Mayo, says the class is helping him to understand the human body in a new way. He realizes that the crux of beauty is symmetry and understanding that will help him become a better plastic surgeon.
“Often you get caught up in the numbers. In books we learn about the dimensions of the face and you start to break things down into thirds and fourths and dimensions and proportions, and this kind of takes us away from that," Mayo said. "It makes us look more critically.”
And he’s pretty happy with how his sculpture turned out.
“I don’t have that much of an artistic side, typically, I’ve never taken art classes or done drawings. But I’d say it’s at least average!”
For more photos and details about the class, look in Country Roads Magazine.