Bedside vigil: from contemporary painting to palliative care

The painting is over two metres high, more than a metre wide, and from the end of the upper room, it’s radiating with bright colours and intriguing forms. I’m looking at a work by artist Gabriella Boyd, in Dumfriesshire’s Cample Line gallery. The image is unmissable, yet I seem drawn to it by contrary feelings.

I think I know something about what is going on here, but at the same time I’m puzzled.

The painting is telling me a story, but not through any obvious narrative progression. 

A person is laid in a bed, heavily blanketed, and looking upwards. Halfway down the bed, a second person appears to be standing, or perhaps sitting, the left arm on the covers. This figure looks towards the other, their straight back somehow exposed in arrow head brush strokes, along the spine. A wide, open window splashes shards of light onto the bedclothes, and brings a sylvan exterior into the formal composition of the room.

This large painting is oil on linen and what I have described here covers only about one third of its extent. In the remainder I see abstract shapes, some semi-geometric, others flower-like. They are blocked in purple, grey, lime-green and something the colour of clay. Sharp lines in white and blue lead across and down through the painting. Is this form at bottom left, an empty chair at the foot of the bed?

On the edge of these abstractions, and just left of the very centre of the painting, there’s a bright red heart.

I glance at the accompanying notes. The painting is called Telogen and the artist says that it is about the strokes of light on the bed and the body lying in it, from which emanate ‘hair, nerves, tendrils, electricity’. Despite the earnest calm that envelops the two figures, the painting fizzes with energy. It is paradoxical and provocative.

Just before visiting Gabriella Boyd’s exhibition, I was reading about a new caring innovation: the deathbed etiquette guide. Apparently people in the modern world are so unfamiliar with the social practices of being with a dying person, that some professionals now offer an information ‘resource’ to support relatives and close ones as they wait for someone to die.

It was not always like that.

In the nineteenth century members of the extended family, confident in their role, would gather in numbers for a vigil, which for the upper classes in particular, was something of a public event. In death as in life, social position and influence could be portrayed in deportment, gesture and the composition of those present. Deathbed scenes of this type abound in the nineteenth century art of many western countries. They formed part of the ars moriendi, in an era when the liminality of the dying process was itself being extended. Diseases like cancer and tuberculosis were replacing trauma and pestilence as the more common causes of death.

Today, the ‘long goodbye’ has become even more marked. Slow dying in advanced age seems less conducive to the crowded deathbed vigil. Its pattern is uncertain and halting. The lonely death has become more common, and the presence of even one person at the bedside when life ends is less certain. The deathbed is now a private space, as this painting clearly shows.

In France the term les soins d’accompagnement is often used at the end of life. Accompanying care. The Japanese have a single word for it: mitori. Being with, being present for the dying person. In the Christian context there are echoes from the Garden of Gethsemane: watch with me.

This attentive presence is strikingly represented in Gabriella Boyd’s painting. Moreover, she also attends to its embodied, entangled, aspects. We don’t know if the end of life is near, whether the person in the bed is indeed dying or recovering. There is no hint about the relationship between the two figures, nor of their gender or age. Ambiguities abound, yet I find  more than enough detail for my own interpretation of what is going on.

The pioneer of modern hospice care, Cicely Saunders (1918-2005) first drew her inspiration from a dying Polish émigré she met in post world war two London. He left her with two memorable phrases that guided her future practice and advocacy, and which are still much used today. Indeed, they have become iconic in hospice thinking: ‘I’ll be a window in your home’ and ‘I only want what is in your mind and in your heart’.

It’s a story with which, as Cicely Saunders’ biographer, I’m very familiar. How curious then, that in a first encounter with the work of Gabriella Boyd, I find these and other palliative care elements so strikingly present, in Telogen.

Featured image:

Gabriella Boyd, installation shot Featuring Telogen, Strangers and Presser, all 2024, CAMPLE LINE, 23 March – 2 June 2024. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York | London. Photo: Patrick Jameson

Main image of Telogen:

Gabriella Boyd, Telogen, 2024, oil on linen, 220 x 150cm. Courtesy of the artist and GRIMM Amsterdam | New York | London. Photo: Stephen White and Co.