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Andrew Faulk, M.D. ’84, and the Frank H. Jernigan Charitable Foundation
Andrew Faulk, M.D. ’84, recently perfected a procedure. It involves dropping a ball bearing so that it smashes a plate of glass four stories below.
This is not a medical procedure; in fact, Faulk is retired from medicine. It is an artistic procedure, one of the steps Faulk takes in creating canvases that fuse paint and broken glass. Faulk now works as an artist, and in spring 2007 had his first gallery show at Linda Fairchild Contemporary Art in San Francisco, Calif.
The move from practicing clinician to artist has taken Faulk two decades. Fresh out of an internal medicine residency, Faulk spent four months at a small, dysfunctional medical practice in San Francisco. He then moved to Los Angeles, Calif., when colleague Victor Beer offered him a job at a practice specializing in HIV and AIDS. Faulk stayed at the practice for eight years.
“It was like the wild, wild West,” says Faulk. At the beginning, and in the absence of effective treatment for HIV-AIDS, there was little that he and his colleagues could do for patients. Hopeful and desperate, patients would ask Faulk for medications they’d seen on television or heard about on the street — drugs like “Compound Q,” reputed to come from China and completely untested.
Although the doctors worked hard, and advances in care came with the development of AZT, mortality rates were very high. “I was losing two patients a week,” says Faulk. He also lost friends. And finally, Faulk lost his partner, who contracted HIV-related non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Faulk decided to leave his HIV-AIDS practice. With that decision, he also left medicine entirely. “Once I’d stepped away,” he says, “it just seemed too difficult to go back.”
Instead, Faulk spent the next four years studying sculpting. Initially, he thought that his years as a doctor might give him an advantage in understanding and interpreting the human body. But he was dissatisfied with the results. “On a fundamental level, artists look at the body differently,” he says.
One day, Faulk found an unexpected source of inspiration while visiting the Museum of Modern Art in San Francisco: an untitled painting, informally called “Black,” by Robert Rauschenberg. The artist’s layering of paint with other media led Faulk to pick up a paintbrush and experiment, first with paper and later with glass and ball bearings.
“Breaking glass is a noisy event,” says Faulk, and an evocative one for anyone who lives in a culture that uses and values glass. Faulk wants people to do more than see his paintings. He wants people to listen to them, too — to hear and react to the shattered glass. In part, this is a response to his career as a physician during the worst years of the AIDS epidemic.
“When I was practicing medicine, I was struck by the silence with which people passed away,” says Faulk. Our lives are so full of noise, he says: playing, yelling, talking, humming. Dying is often just an exhalation of breath. “The dichotomy resonates with my art,” he says.
Faulk and his partner, Frank Jernigan, are well aware of another dichotomy in medicine — the fact that grants and gifts are often directed to well established research projects, while the basic science that helps researchers gather useful data is comparatively underfunded.
The Frank H. Jernigan Charitable Foundation seeks to shrink that funding gap by supporting basic research. The foundation also supports research into life-threatening diseases like multiple sclerosis and HIV-AIDS and promotes education.
In 2006, the foundation made contributions to research in AIDS and multiple sclerosis at UW Medicine.
In addition to meeting the foundation’s mission, these gifts were also motivated by gratitude. Faulk appreciates the care his brother — who has advanced MS — has received at UW Medicine. He also appreciates his degree. “I feel so fortunate,” Faulk says. “I feel the UW did such a terrific job educating me in medicine.”
2007
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