Among the recognizable images in a display of a local artist's abstract drawings are eyes, a dollar sign and, most prominent, a colon.
Ashley McCoy said she draws and layers images without thinking and didn't notice the internal anatomy amid the black, white and red charcoal and paint stains until someone pointed it out to her.
As occasionally happens, McCoy's stream-of-consciousness etching spat out an image of Crohn's disease, a chronic illness that causes McCoy intense abdominal pain and occasional hospital stays.
McCoy, 26, wants to raise awareness of the disease but doesn't purposely do it in her art. She doesn't have to try.
"I'm an artist first, but one who has Crohn's disease," she said. "They intersect a lot of times because my art is very personal."
She talked last week at the Artful Dodger coffeehouse, where five of her canvas drawings have been on exhibition for four weeks.
Gesturing to the work hanging behind her, she said, "I try to be really honest with what I do on canvas. These are just brutally honest paintings."
Crohn's is a painful intestinal inflammation that happens when sufferers' immune systems attack their own bodies. Scientists are unsure what causes the disorder, and there is no cure.
Individuals typically endure bouts of piercing pain in the lower-right abdomen and diarrhea. Those afflicted can enjoy extended periods of remission or endure prolonged flare-ups.
McCoy was diagnosed with the disease at 19 while she was a freshman at Mary Washington College.
For her, recurrences of Crohn's and hospitalizations have punctuated an artistic sojourn that began after her medical leave from Mary Washington.
She went on to work at a stained-glass shop in Charleston, S.C., where she also commuted to a glass-blowing apprenticeship in an all-natural tree house in a Georgia swamp.
But the disease forced her back near family in the Harrisonburg area. In December, she earned a bachelor's degree in studio art from James Madison University.
Crohn's has rerouted her career, changed her diet and forced her to take up to 50 pills a day for treatment. It has tripped up her education several times.
But her artwork has stayed the course. McCoy's mother, Rita C. McCoy, credits her daughter's positive outlook for the way she has coped with her illness.
"She has a super attitude," Rita McCoy said. "She in no way wants 'poor, pitiful me' type of sympathy from anyone because that's not the way she looks at herself."
Ashley McCoy said getting on her hands and knees to draw her canvas abstracts has been one of her best treatments.
"Art is a really nice way to keep from feeling down," she said. "When I get down to paint, it all comes out, and all the weight comes off my shoulders."
She has been able to cope with the disease because of the support of her friends and family and because of the caring hand of her Harrisonburg physician, Dr. T. Keith Vest, she said. She works at a family furniture business while doing her art projects on the side, she said.
She wants to publicize her experience with Crohn's in part out of sympathy to those who have to deal with the disease without the support and the financial resources she has, she said.
She also thinks public awareness brings sufferers closer to a cure.
"Historically, the more people become aware of a disease, the more [scientific] attention it gets," she said.
http://www.timesdispatch.com/servlet/Satellite?pagename=RTD%2FMGArticle%2FRTD_BasicArticle&c=MGArticle&cid=1031774823163&path=!news&s=1045855934842
By Calvin R. Trice
Times-Dispatch Staff Writer
Apr 11, 2004
HARRISONBURG