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By Corrie MacLaggan
Monday, January 07, 2008
When Tim Brown worked at an Austin-based hot line for cancer patients around the country, he listened to callers’ deeply personal stories and worries about pain and healing. He gave them information about their type of cancer and connected them with support groups.
And then, because of the nature of the job, he never talked to them again.
In an attempt to create some continuity — and to break the monotony of the phone calls — he started sketching what he imagined the faraway callers might look like. Those sketches inspired a series of paintings he created in his East Austin studio.
“You’re only going on faith that it was making a difference,” said Brown, 39, who said his background in social work left him with a desire to follow up with people.
More than three years after leaving his job at the American Cancer Society’s National Cancer Information Center, Brown has used the images to produce 10 paintings, each with a grid of 20 faces. Near each face is the place the person called from: “Bristol, VA,” “Canyon City, CO,” “Grand Prairie, TX.” Or “Unknown.”
The cartoon-style portraits range from wrinkled to youthful, plump to rail-thin. There are brown faces, white faces and sickly green faces: “A veritable quilt of life and death in these United States,” Brown wrote in his blog.
The series, “Strong Senders,” takes its name from the idea that people can psychically send their energy; in this case, Brown said, so strongly that he picked it up on the other end of the phone line.
“I talked to all these people, and more importantly, listened to them,” Brown wrote. “They all made an impression on me. I, in turn, made an impression of them.”
Brown started working at the call center shortly after moving to Austin in 1999. His mother had just died of brain cancer.
His job title: cancer information specialist.
His task: using an American Cancer Society database of up-to-date information, answer callers’ questions about different kinds of cancer and treatments. Help people find wigs or medical equipment. Send brochures.
“A lot of times, people just wanted to talk,” Brown said. “I wasn’t just seeing the public faces of people. They were putting niceties to the side, expressing pain, joy.”
He heard a lot about people’s difficulties with health insurance.
“You had to absorb a lot of anger,” he said. “I’m amazed people can do it as long as they do.”
Kevin Babb, strategic director of the National Cancer Information Center, said it doesn’t surprise him that Brown turned to art.
“I think people have to de-stress,” said Babb, who arrived at the call center after Brown left. “Everyone has their own way of dealing with it.”
The call center has moved into spacious new quarters with a relaxation room, where representatives can watch a virtual crackling fire on a flat-screen TV or thumb through a National Geographic magazine after a stressful call.
In his four years at the call center, Brown estimates, he spoke with 30,000 people.
There was no time limit for the calls.
During long calls, he doodled. In 2003, Brown — who has a bachelor’s degree in painting — brought a sketchbook to work.
Some callers were easy to visualize. One portrait, “Unknown,” has spiky reddish hair and a black tank top. The man had called from his job at a convenience store wanting help quitting smoking. While talking to Brown, he was selling cigarettes.
“He was crazy,” Brown said. “He said: ‘I’m celebrating, man. I just woke up a year ago from a coma.’ It was his waking-up-from-a-coma birthday.”
Brown drew some symbolic portraits. A caller who threw a temper tantrum got an erupting volcano for a face.
By the time Brown left the job six months later, he had sketched 250 portraits.
Later, he traced 20 at a time onto a single sheet of paper, then painted the background and faces with gouache, an opaque watercolor. Finally, like a cartoonist, he inked in the faces.
Brown, who helps run the Okay Mountain gallery, also works part-time for a nonprofit organization that backs access to public transportation for people with disabilities.
In the afternoons, he works in his studio, where he’s planning to spend much of 2008 on a final “Strong Senders” piece: a giant painting with 200 faces. He’s also working on a book he expects to publish next year about the faces and the stories behind them.
He took a call from a Mickey Mantle once, as well as an Elizabeth Taylor and two Lois Lanes.
There was also a caller named Tim Brown.
