Medical education activities of the Association of American Medical Colleges.

Sir—Drawing ability could be disrupted by many neurological disorders, of which graphic neglect after unilateral brain damage (generally of right parietal cortex) is most frequent. In this disorder, patients draw preferentially on the right side of the paper, omit and deform objects on the left side, but judge their drawings to be complete. Graphic neglect can become especially evident in the work of professional painters, offering the unique opportunity to examine the effect of brain damage upon artistic graphical expression. Here, we describe a 71-year-old, right-handed, female professional painter, who had a haemorrhage in the right posterior parietal lobe, leading to left lower quadrantanopia without sensory or motor loss. Drawing and copying during neuropsychological assessment showed mild left-sided graphic neglect, but this disorder was more obvious in a spontaneous drawing (figure): the bouquet of roses is shifted to the right of the paper and is less elaborated on the left side. Left roses are distorted and deformed, whereas roses are delicately drawn on the right. Visual inspection of her drawing showed that graphic neglect for colour (GNC) was much stronger than graphic neglect for contour or form (GNF). Use of the colours violet, orange, and green concentrates on the right side of her drawings. Whereas on the right side colour is applied completely and evenly to the drawn objects’ borders, this is not the case on the left. GNC was stronger than GNF in 16 of 22 of the artist’s coloured drawings. The difference between GNC and GNF was significant only in the left visual field (Student’s t test, p<0·0002). Neither GNC nor GNF were present in premorbid drawings and disappeared 6 weeks after brain damage. Our findings show that parietal damage modifies an artists’ drawing capacity not only in spatial terms but also in a predominant way for a visual stimulus attribute such as colour. This finding stresses that the organisation of the cerebral cortex affects not only systematically such elementary functions as vision and manual skill but also more complex forms of human endeavour, such as artistic graphical expression. Whereas the value of psychology for art theory is widely accepted, our present finding suggests that neurology and neurophysiology might also offer an avenue to the artists’ mind. *Olaf Blanke, Stéphanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis