Mortal Darkness

Ken Currie “Three Oncologists” (2002)
(Credit: nationalgalleries.org/portraitgallery)

Three faces stare back at you, momentarily caught in the light as they turn into a looming darkness behind a curtain. Three men, clothed in gowns that quickly read medical. The illuminated gowns are covers that protect and contextualize these men as doctors.

The men’s hands hold items that hint at a foreboding knowledge. One holds a loose paper and pulls back the curtain, another holds an implement that glints in the light but remains indistinct, and the last holds his hands — taut in pause — gloved and at the ready to contact something in the dark.

Close-up of the oncologists, credited above

The men are hunched over, resigned, their shoulders giving way to the weight of whatever it is behind the curtain that they are moving towards. Their eyes peer at us, their mouths drawn down. We have caught them in one moment. In the next they have moved into a place out of sight, opaque and unknowable. Only we are left in the light.

These men know something we, the viewers in the light, can’t.

These men know something we, the viewers in the light, can’t. They exist in both worlds, their light dissolving into and arising from the dark. Their bodies, those vehicles of light and life, are giving way. They are indistinct, losing form, ghostly and blurred. They seem feeble even though they wield tremendous power.

Close up of the hands of the oncologists, credited above

The implements that empower them to contact the dark and come back alive — their hands — remain intact and detailed, lifelike. As are their faces, which are distinct and hint at the power of their knowledge and their individuality.

These three men, we are told in the title, are oncologists. They are named in the full title,”Three Oncologists (Professor RJ Steele, Professor Sir Alfred Cuschieri and Professor Sir David P. Lane of the Department of Surgery and Molecular Oncology, Ninewells Hospital, Dundee)”, as this is a portrait of three highly accomplished and esteemed oncologists. The painting hangs in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. These men have dedicated their hands and their minds to the ravages of cancer, and are immortalized in paint by the hands of artist Ken Currie.

Currie has stated that he prefers for his viewers to draw their own conclusions from his work, though he discusses this particular portrait in relation to a key conversation he had with one of the doctors, Sir David Lane. Lane considers cancer as a darkness, and their roles as oncologists is to go into the darkness and bring people back to the light.

But that darkness, that place of unknowingness behind the curtain, remains haunting.

Hands in the light, a close up of the image credited above

Armed with this information, this portrait would seem fairly straightforward. But that darkness, that place of unknowingness behind the curtain, remains haunting.

The terror of the dark, the fear of what we cannot know, looms heavily. It consumes the light like a cancer.

Even these men, so highly trained and experienced, can’t fully know the darkness because they can’t control it. Their attempts at doing so are endlessly heroic if not triumphant. Death triumphs, always, in the end.

These men know this by heart. But they continue on, the way we all must, heavy with the burden of mortality. Yet, it is beautiful — is it not? — these brief moments we have in the light.