Where Art Meets Science

By: Mr Stephen McCulley
Created on 16th June 2011

With a lifelong love of art and an outstanding academic career culminating in first medical and then specialist surgical degrees, Mr Stephen J McCulley decided to merge his two interests by becoming a plastic surgeon. Here he explains how his art influences his work and vice versa

I can’t remember a time when art wasn’t part of my life. As a child I did a huge amount of drawing, modelling and building things, and as I grew older that developed into more serious artwork.

As I chose academic and science subjects at school, art was not part of my school syllabus. However, I sat both O Level and A Level in the subject despite having never attended lessons, so great was my love for it.

I suppose it was when I was a teenager that my work became more sophisticated, and that was also when I started toying with the idea of becoming a surgeon. I thought surgery sounded very exciting, which was what appealed to me, and that idea was only confirmed when I went to medical school.

The decision to become a plastic surgeon came after I graduated from medical school, when I took a year out to go backpacking around the world.

My interest in art had continued throughout university, where I was a member of various art clubs and, knowing this, somebody gave me a sketchbook as a going-away present. That was when I first started doing life drawing.

I sketched travellers around the world, people I met in every country, and when I came back I had this sketchbook packed full of sketches of people. From then on I was only interested in drawing the human figure.

When I returned from travelling I also took up sculpture, going back to my previous interest in modelling. I found that actually I was slightly better at sculpture than I was at drawing and I think, looking back, that was probably when I first started to think about specialising in plastic surgery.

My NHS specialty is in breast reconstruction, which is very much a case of modelling a new breast, from flesh taken from the stomach, and that very neatly incorporates all my interests, so it is not surprising that this is where my career has taken me.

Art influencing surgery

I don’t think you have to be good at drawing to be a good surgeon, but an artistic eye is very useful and I think many good surgeons use artistic principles without even being aware of it. ~

For example, when I am drawing a figure, I might be standing quite close to the canvas to draw the detail of the hand, but I then have to step back to make sure the hand looks right in proportion to the rest of the drawing, and that process is repeated for every section of the picture.

Surgery is the same – you can’t judge the aesthetic of a breast by looking just at the breast, you need to look at the body as a whole and make sure it balances out.

If a woman comes in and she has a big tummy and she wants big breasts, that’s fine in terms of the surgery, but aesthetically it may make her look a bit matronly, and as a surgeon you need to explain that.

Another example is that if I’m drawing a figure I would never start with the features of the face, I do a rough smudge of the whole body, stand back, check it’s right and then rework it, before adding in any of the finer details.

It is exactly the same technique to do a breast reconstruction. You make what you think is broadly a breast shape, and then stand back and ask yourself: does that look like a breast, is it the right shape, the right volume, before going back and starting to add in the detail.

That ability to step back and look at proportion and balance is very important in plastic and cosmetic surgery and I think all good surgeons do it, even if they don’t quite realise it.

Surgery influencing art

As well as my artistic skills being useful in surgery, I also think that my surgical and anatomical knowledge has a huge impact on my art.

As a surgeon, you literally undress someone’s skin. So I can look at a model and I can truly see their muscles, their skeleton, and I can perhaps capture movement or muscle tone in a way that many nonmedically trained artists would take years to learn.

A surgeon is constantly training yourself, and so it’s not surprising that there are many surgeons who are also good artists.

Another thing is that sometimes, when I do a drawing, I’ll draw a certain line and something about it just looks great; it has a certain power to its movement, and it looks perfect. Then the rest of the drawing flows from that one line.

That’s something I recognise from my surgical work too – when I’m shaping a piece of fat into a breast and I stand back and look at it, sometimes I just think: Wow, that looks perfect, that curve of the breast is just exactly right. So again the two processes can be very similar.

A break from the chaos

Because I only ever do figurative art – both in terms of my drawing and my sculpture – people often assume it is something of a busman’s holiday, but that couldn’t be further from the truth.

My life as a surgeon is totally bombarded. When I’m not actually operating I am always doing three things at once – speaking to a journalist whilst checking my emails and updating my diary – and that’s not even including my domestic responsibilities. I am constantly being pulled in different directions.

When you really get into art, you totally absorb yourself in it. It’s a very solitary pursuit. When you look at famous or successful artists, they often seem a bit socially inept, because they spend the majority of their life wrapped up in their own world. And for me, in my own amateurish way, it’s the same – the world becomes irrelevant.

I think art and surgery deal neatly with two very different facets of my personality – on the one hand I get a huge kick out of the excitement and hustle and bustle of surgery, but at the end of the day when I come home, I crave the solitude and the mindfulness that art provides.