Abandon your work
Nazanin Moghbeli Nazanin Moghbeli

Abandon your work

Abandon your work


“Work conscientiously, do the best you can, then abandon your work to its good or bad future, having carefully put at the bottom the date of origin.”   

-----Zola to Cezanne 1860



It is a rainy day in Paris, and I am walking to my art studio in the Basille. I find a small cafe and  wedge myself into a corner spot, ordering an espresso. Its bitter taste is tinged with tobacco as it blends with the smoke from neighboring tables. I find this time important to get my brain in the right frame of mind, and I alternate writing in my journal with people-watching. 


Just weeks earlier, I had quit my job as a cardiologist in a prestigious US hospital, and had moved to Paris.The decision was driven by curiosity- what would it feel like to shed the painfully acquired layers of my identity as a doctor and step entirely into my artist self? For 11 years I had been practicing as a cardiologist, with a loyal patient panel, impressive colleagues, and a fulfilling medical career. I had been struggling to make art at the margins, snatching pre-dawn hours to make work, exhibiting when the time allowed, and trying to stay connected to my small community of artist friends. Not to mention the pull of 3 children at three different stages of life. I felt exhausted and burned out from this juggling act, and so gave up my practice and moved my family of 5 across the Atlantic to Paris.  


I finish my coffee and cross the street to enter the studio, climbing to the 2nd floor. 

I take out the tissue-thin paper  from my red bag, smooth it as much as I can, and when the wrinkles persist, tear the paper in frustration. I begin to pour my ink onto these scraps, out of boredom and without a clear path forward. The ink pools in some places, seeps into the paper in others, and travels rapidly between the paper fibers. It reminds me a bit of the small capillaries in the human circulation, the blood traveling at the speed determined by the resistance of the blood vessel. I pull out my thicker rag paper, and repeat the same exercise, placing pools of ink on the paper and watching them travel through the paper fibers. I can see that the different papers carry ink in different ways- on the thin paper, the ink flows quickly, saturating the surface, while on the thicker, more compressed paper, the ink stops abruptly after several millimeters. I dilute the ink with water, and notice how the flow changes, again reminding me of the speed of blood flow through arteries as the viscosity of the blood changes, causing heart attacks or strokes. In my drawings, the folds in the paper cause a rupture of the smooth line of ink, just as in a heart attack, a buildup of plaque in the artery causes a rupture in the flow of blood.


I think back to my life as a cardiologist, when I reviewed  EKGs and telemetry strips to learn about the electrical activity in the hearts of my patients, a window into what happens to a person at a moment of critical illness. If interpreted correctly, we give life-saving treatments, such as an electric shock, to restore the heart rhythm to normal. These lines reach into that space between life and death, and weakly tether these critically ill patients to life.


As I stand working in my Paris studio, the tenuous connection between the different parts of my identity come into clearer focus. As a doctor, I use diagnostic tools- coronary angiograms, EKGs, echocardiograms, to create drawings in my mind of the body in real time, and use this information to treat my patients. In the studio I make physical drawings on paper that tell their stories. I realized that it was necessary to leave the bedside, leave my comfortable suburban life, be stretched in different ways, in order to then return to my life as a physician.


When I returned to the US, I resumed my practice as a cardiologist, and started teaching a series of workshops to healthcare providers and students using what I learned in my year of making art in Paris. These workshops range from museum outings where I teach how careful observation of art work can translate to clinical practice, to studio sessions where I teach foundational drawing skills. I have given these workshops to medical and nursing students and practitioners throughout the US and abroad, and am launching this blog series to supplement my workshops with thoughts about creativity in art and in medicine. 

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