We delve into the transformative intersection of art and healing, examining how creativity can serve as a powerful tool for emotional and spiritual healing. Dr. Vasu Tolia shares invaluable insights, emphasizing the importance of being a perpetual student and the wisdom passed down from parents about listening and observing. As we discuss the healing potential of art, we learn how it has helped our guest process decades of experience in medicine and personal loss. From navigating the challenges of being a woman in both medicine and art to the profound impact her work has had on others, this conversation uncovers the nuances of creativity as a bridge to peace and understanding. Join us as we celebrate the resilience of the human spirit through the lens of artistic expression.

The episode captures an enriching dialogue about the intersection of art and healing, where we both share our thoughts on how these realms influence and enrich each other. From the very beginning, I felt the warmth and enthusiasm as we discussed the role of listening—not just in medicine but in the artistic journey. Vasu beautifully articulates the wisdom passed down from their parents, emphasizing the importance of being a lifelong learner and an attentive listener. This serves as a foundation for our exploration of how these principles manifest in both medicine and art, revealing the shared values of compassion and observation that are crucial in both fields.

As the conversation unfolds, we delve into personal stories that highlight the healing potential of art. Dr. Tolia shares touching experiences of how their artworks have brought comfort to patients and caregivers alike, illustrating the profound impact art can have on emotional well-being. We reflect on the idea that creating art can be a therapeutic process, allowing artists to navigate their own emotions and experiences while simultaneously offering solace to others. This dual aspect of art—as a personal journey and a communal healing tool—forms the crux of our discussion.

Towards the end, we tackle the challenges faced by artists in today's world, particularly regarding the fear of artificial intelligence in the creative space. My guest’s pragmatic approach to this concern—embracing technology while maintaining authenticity—provides valuable insights for both budding and established artists. We wrap up our conversation by recognizing the legacy we aim to create, one that emphasizes the importance of using art as a means of healing and connection in a world that often feels fragmented. This episode stands as a testament to the belief that creativity is not just an outlet for expression, but a vital force for healing and understanding.

Takeaways:

• The importance of being a perpetual student and the value of lifelong learning is emphasized in both art and medicine.
• Listening beyond the obvious is crucial, whether treating patients or creating art, as it reveals deeper meanings.
• Art has the power to heal, providing peace and calmness not only to the creator but also to those who experience it.
• Navigating the art world requires perseverance and building connections, regardless of formal training or mentorship.
• Creativity can serve as a powerful healing force, helping individuals process emotions and experiences through various art forms.
• It's essential for artists to start with their feelings and honesty, rather than just striving for beauty in their work.

Well, welcome to the podcast. How you doing today?

I'm very well, thank you.

Good. So looking forward to having you on and talking about art and healing and medicine and all those type of. That you're experts on.

So it should be a fun conversation.

Yes, I'm looking forward to it. Thank you for inviting me, Keith.

Oh, my pleasure. I'm looking forward to it. So let me start with my favorite guest question for all of my guests. What's the best piece of.

Piece of advice you ever received?

One of the most powerful pieces of advice I have received was from my father. He told me I have to be a perpetual student, never to stop learning.

But it was my mother who gave me the softer wisdom that never stopped listening also, and in medicine, it means listening beyond the symptoms, like to the silence, to the interaction between the parent and the patient and what isn't said. And also I found it very useful in art. It is a similar kind of listening to intuition, what you want to do. So that's how.

That's the best piece of advice I have received.

I love that. That is so cool. Amazing how parents give us little nuggets that we may not think about at the time. So. But when we reflect back on what they.

They share with us, it's like there's like little pieces of gold there.

Yeah. Can I ask you a question?

Sure.

I'm curious to know, has a piece of advice ever echoed for you across different parts of your life?

Yeah. You know, it's funny because I use this. This phrase a lot, especially when I'm. When I'm working with difficult situations.

And the advice was, you can't stop stupid. Which to me meant, you know, you can give people good advice, but in the end, they gotta make their own decisions.

And no matter how hard you try to guide people, if they're insistent on making bad choices, they will.

So, you know, it relieved me a lot in terms of working with people and organizations where it's like, you gotta make your own choices, you gotta make the tough decisions.

Yeah, that's so true.

Yeah. It sounds kind of harsh, though. People go, oh, that sounds so mean.

I'm like, well, but you could hit your head against the wall, but it still hurts, you know?

Yeah.

I'm curious, sue, can you give me some people in your life who served as an inspiration or mentor for you? I'm always curious. When people like yourself have had a journey and a lot of influences, who are some people that were really important in.

In your journey of forming, Inform. Forming who you are today?

Unfortunately, no, like, I didn't have any formal mentors or role models in either field that I followed or emul wanted to emulate. In medicine, I had to nurture myself through academic and clinical challenges to become what I became.

And in art, I have had teachers, but I have found my visual voice a few years later through self experimenting during Pandemic because that's when I chose to liberate myself from representational art to abstract and semi abstract art. But I am inspired by artists like Georgia O' Keeffe and Amrita Shergill. She's an Indian artist from 19th century that they.

Their works are, you know, I admire and I look at them and draw inspiration from them. But most personally, it was my mother because she quietly became drawings, began drawing later in her life.

And watching her create gave me silent permission to start over in my second act because she just dated to pastime and grandchildren grew up and they didn't want to sit with her and play with her anymore and do their own things right, which happens at, you know, different stages of life. So she just, you know, did drawing and coloring. And I saw that it gave her a lot of peace. At that point.

It didn't make sense to me as to why she just sat and passed her time like that. But now it makes such a lot of sense that I feel that I must have derived some of my geometrics and color sense from her.

Oh, that's so neat. So tell us about your journey. You kind of got into a little bit of it, bridging the gap between medicine and art.

Kind of what led you on that pathway?

It was an accidental pathway in the sense that when I decided to retire, I felt a void. I had always been so busy carrying so many roles in my life that I was no longer wearing the white coat.

I was no longer the division head and things like that. But the impulse to heal remained in me. It never went away.

So picking up a brush started as a pastime, but evolved into something almost sacred for me, it's become a passion like, you know, art and medicine, they are so different and not so different also. Both of them require deep observation, attention to nuance and compassion. In medicine, I treated the body. Now I feel in art I engage the spirit.

But both are acts of transformation and healing.

To me, that's so neat. So you describe. You just kind of touched on. You describe your art as kind of a journey of the soul.

What does that look like for you personally as you begin kind of a new piece of artwork?

You know, it begins in Contemplation and silence. I rarely start with a concept that's already totally in my mind unless I'm working on a theme.

Like if I'm working on a theme of flowers or figures or women or something, I have to think along those forms and shapes that I want to. But if I'm just starting sitting, painting by myself, I. I let the color, mood, memory guide me.

Sometimes I'm moved by global issues like women's rights, climate change, mental health, and all these thoughts and ideas, they weave themselves onto canvas through my brush and texture and everything. And that's why I call it a soul journey, because it reveals parts of me.

I didn't consciously seek them, but the act of painting was like meditation, and it took me inward. And what you see on the canvas is the outward manifestation of that.

I love that I'm a writer. So for me, writing is kind of my way of expression. And for me, there are moments where I can't really get the idea in my head clearly.

And you kind of. We call writer's block. Do you ever have painter's block where you go, I just can't think of something to put on the canvas?

And if you do, how do you break through that blockage in your spirit or your. Your creativity?

To be honest with you, I haven't had that chance because. Or happened to me, because we tend to travel quite a bit too, so I'm away from blocks of dying.

So during those times, I'm naturally not painting because I'm not an outdoor painter. I'm an indoor painter.

And I work with acrylics, which don't take well to just open air, and they would dry very quickly, and you wouldn't be able to change things.

Right.

And I have never been an outdoor painter. But as far as the block is concerned, sometimes I do feel it, but it doesn't stop me because I work on several paintings at one time.

So if I'm stuck on one, I'll just put it aside and work on another. But like you, when I'm traveling or when I can't paint, I also write. I write poetry and things like that.

So that also helps me shift my mood and focus, you know, from painting to something different. Do you.

Do you think that your paintings have a certain recurring theme in them or is it kind of everyone has its own unique people piece or. Or feeling to it?

I would say yes. I'm considered a colorist because I love bright colors. That doesn't mean that I don't work in pastels and softer colors. And all also.

But I try to blend colors and textures into developing whatever I want to express, whether it is a flower or a woman or just a nature scene.

Very often I will personalize for environmental paintings, you know, like, I'll personalize Earth as a woman, you know, or Seasons as a woman, because then it kind of blends the humanity and nature together, like, to blend the two forms. And I feel that I'm giving more power to my own gender by doing that and trying to make a statement about how we should have equal rights and voices.

I love that. Have you discovered there's barriers for women like yourself in the art industry?

I'm just curious, being from India, have you run across kind of a stigma or blockage in terms of your ability to kind of flourish in that. In that space?

Not in the art world as much, but in medicine, I did face it in the beginning. Like, you know, you have to rise above everybody and be the cream of the crop, you know, to make yourself known and heard.

And similarly in art world, because I haven't had formal art training, so I do more intuitively.

Like, I have had no mentors who will hold my hand or recommend me, but I have joined, you know, art societies and things like that and develop some friendships who. Like, there are ladies who have been painting for a long time, and they do help me and suggest things when I'm stuck. But overall, it's.

It's a journey in which as you make friendship and develop connections, you know, things can happen. But above all, you just have to do your work and persevere and produce your best and be out there competing. Because if.

If I don't put my things in a show, it doesn't have a chance to get seen or be rewarded if the tutor thinks, you know, it's worth something more than ordinary. So I. I think it's. It's a matter of.

Rather than letting any such stigma stop me or anyone else, I would suggest that people should just keep on doing what they want to do and be good at it and wait for your turn.

Yeah, I love that You. You mentioned that you believe that art, like medicine, has the power to heal.

How have you seen that healing manifest in your own life and the life of people who've experienced your work?

For myself, art helped me process decades of emotional weight from medicine. You know, producing all those papers and mentoring, teaching and taking care of patients had taken its toll. Although I have not.

I had not realized it because I used to enjoy it. So it was not a process of burnout. It Was a process of stepping back. But, you know, art does help you heal.

I lost my brother recently, and I'm grieving, and I think that I want to create paintings that will create calm and serenity and peace within myself and maybe those who view my art.

I'm thinking of making paintings with Buddha, like creating a Lotus and lion series, you know, where lion is the voice of Buddha teachings, and lotus is the calmness that you know you have to rise above whatever grieves you or bothers you and still continue to shine in others. I feel that the viewers tell me that they feel peaceful.

One of my paintings is in Henry Ford hospital Cardiology center, and the nurses tell us, and it's called determination. I have heard from the nurses over there that it helps them look at it and say, yes, we might work.

Must work on this patient to get better, faster, and things like that. A cancer patient once told me that one of my works brought her a lot of calm during chemotherapy.

So these are calm healings, but they are profound in nature. So have you had any of the guests talk about creativity as a healing force?

No, I haven't, actually. This is. No. But I have had several people who have used, like, poetry, other art forms to bring about healing with either words or sometimes music.

I have a person, I don't know who's. Who does kind of what you do, but with music and creating beautiful musical pieces to bring about that kind of communication with. With God and with.

With our soul.

Yeah, no, that's so true. Because, you know, visual art is not the only form of art that can heal.

There are so many forms of artworks, you know, that can cause that same thing. So I think we just have to be open to all those forms.

Yeah, that is so true. Is. I know for me, I have, like, my favorite piece of writing. Is there a favorite piece of artwork that is one of those that you.

This, even though it may not be. It may not be popular in terms of monetary, but just one that you like.

This is one I'm really, really one of my favorite or several of my favorites, actually.

I could name a few. Okay, I'll start with my painting during COVID time called the world united in this, during the Pandemic.

How, you know, every country in the world was struggling to fight the virus and how to deal with it, the morbidity and mortality. So this painting has. I have a hand which is grabbing the virus, but still the virus is escaping in the atmosphere and becomes faded.

So what I did is in this hand, I put stamps of the world, suggesting that the whole world is trying to fight the virus. And that is a piece that was considered top 20 in the nation by Washington Post.

And later CDC solicited that artwork to put on the COVID of their journal. So I think that's. That has meant a lot to me that medicine and art came together for me at that point.

Another one is a portrait of my husband that I painted and I called it A Penny for Them because it shows his face and captured quiet introspection and love. Like he has a subtle smile and, you know, is thinking deeply.

Then there is another one called Waves of Renewal, which is currently in the solo show that's Hanging, which I painted with my grandson, that he did the background and I did the foreground. So some of these have very special meanings for me.

They are just not paintings, but they are like memory, connection and emotional markers in my life.

That's so special. So I'm curious, you say you're working on several paintings, usually at the same time.

So what's the next series of things that you're going to have that's coming out that we'll be able to see?

My current solo show is called Floral Whispers and I have 49 paintings in them and it's showing at the Flagstar Theater, Strand gallery in Pontiac, Michigan until September 13th.

After that, I'm thinking of or actually right now I'm thinking of beginning this series on Buddha paintings I mentioned, like the lion and the Lotus series in which I will show Buddha in. So I may just do a few of them, but otherwise I think I will just go back to nature because I find nature very healing too.

So I may just create some abstract scenes and colors and things like that.

I also work in, you know, the groups, so I am part of group shows and recently had some digital works accepted in for Art Basel in the Creativity for Future.

And I also create the downloadable booklets, you know, and challenges for art exercises and healing through art, like giving beginning guidance some ideas to people how to start doing this. And I work with neuro arts groups to bring creativity into healthcare settings.

So I feel I have a lot to give and am looking forward to doing many of these projects.

That's a great segue because I was going to ask you two things, actually. One thing I've recently heard, especially for artists who show their works a lot, have you run across the fear or even the concern that AI?

Because I've heard people say this, they're afraid to post their art online because they're afraid AI will capture what they do and recreate it and kind of steal some of the ideas that they put out there for the world to enjoy.

You know, I don't actually fear that because I can do so many things, even when without looking at the art that is already existing. I mean, it's such a powerful tool, and it has to be used very judiciously. You know, like, you don't want AI to.

You don't want to produce a work with AI and say it's your own.

Right.

So that kind of honesty has to come. But when I did do some of these digital pieces for Art Basel, I did use AI as part of it, and it was a challenge to learn and all.

But then I did say that this was done with the help of A.I. you know, I didn't own complete ownership. It was my idea, but I worked with AI to create it.

Right.

So. And, you know, it is here to stay, and I think we just have to use it properly and effectively so that we can get the most out of it.

Good point.

If you were trying to advise someone who was just getting into art, young art student who kind of aspires to kind of do what you're doing, or what advice do you have for young artists?

I'm taking this in perspective to see somebody. Young artists. So I suppose that they have had some formal background, art education or. You mean children who are starting?

Yeah, just people starting out. Young artists who maybe have had classes, but they're trying to figure out, how do I break into the art world and.

And get my work seen and get a good viewing from my work.

It's a process as to why you are starting just because you like it, or are you trying to process grieving, or are you angry or anxious? And I would let that emotion lead the way.

If it's just for learning, because you want to produce something beautiful or meaningful or want to send message, you have to start with what that feeling is, you know, and process that and use whatever you have, pen, brush, clay, music, whatever you want to do, fiber, fabric, anything. Because it's. If it's a message about just making beautiful stuff, you will make what you want to.

But if it's about healing and connection, you don't require talent. You only require honesty. Because you don't want to create something just beautiful. You just want to express what you are trying to process.

So aim for reality of what you want to project, not just to create some pretty stuff is what I would suggest.

Good point. Good point. I love to ask my guests this question, as you think about your legacy. What is the legacy you want to leave behind?

Especially think about inspiring future generations of artists.

I would say it's never too late to begin again. That healing comes in many forms, that my art and medicine don't live in two separate worlds. They dance together in the realm of hope.

I already have a lot of legacy in medicine and hopefully with these kinds of booklets and the messages with NeuroArts projects that I'm doing, I'm hoping that I can create a bigger mark and have people remember me for trying to do this for everybody. Not just patience, but it is also a hallmark of creativity.

So I think if we embrace some of these processes in our everyday life, maybe the stress and burnout will be a lot less.

Because if you're trying to process that stress and burnout by engaging in these kinds of activities, it's, it's going to help you deal with the obstacles or whatever setbacks one is having in life a lot better. And that way we would have less violence and more peace in this world.

Which should be nice. We definitely want more of that.

Yes, yes.

Where can people find your art and connect with you on social media?

I am available through my website at any time www.wasutolia.art and I'm also on Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn with my short name Vasutolia and full name Vasundhara Tolia. And I hope you'll be able to give some of these links in your notes. And I do have a downloadable magnet for your listeners.

You know, they can start a five day project of create building bridges in different ways by creating, practicing some artworks and they can get it by signing up at the link I have provided and hopefully they'll like it and come back for more.

Well, thank you so much. That's a great gift for my audience. I'll make sure I promote that and put that link below so people can follow you. Thank you for what you do.

I think it's so critical for us to find ways to bring healing to a hurting world.

And that's one of my goals with the podcast that I do is, is to bring resources and gifts to the audience so that their lives can be uplifted and encouraged and fruitful because God made them to accomplish so much. And so I love to have guests on who have shared that same vision for making the world a much better and more productive place.

So thank you for what you do and for the artwork you provide to cheer people up who are dealing with cancer or just give them a smile on a sad day, but to bring about the opportunity for the art to really restore their souls.

Yeah. Thank you so much for having me. It was my honor to be on your show.

Well, thank you.