Ashley Bravin Paints the Parts That Don't Show Up on Tests

By Kristine Schomaker I'm watching a Zoom screen where a medical school auditorium at USC is showing a painting of a service dog wearing a medical alert vest, his human hooked up to an IV pole surrounded by pharmaceutical labels and pain scales. The dog's eyes are clear and calm. The human's body is deconstructed into medical diagrams - intestines visible, organs exposed, reduced to systems and symptoms.

Ashley Bravin just got out of the hospital with sepsis a week ago. She got on a plane anyway to talk about her art practice documenting chronic illness. That fact alone tells you something about disability advocacy.

The artist talk happened through USC's HEAL program (that's Health, Ethics, Art, and the Law), where Ted Meyer has been bringing artists into conversation with medical students for years. I've been following Ashley's work since I first saw her "Catharsis" series - these unflinching mixed media paintings that show exactly what it's like to live with fibromyalgia, ME/CFS, chronic migraine, occipital neuralgia, dysautonomia. The medical terminology piles up. The experience is singular.

The Pivot Nobody Plans For

Ashley started as a scientific illustrator. Studied at Carnegie Mellon, got research grants to document blood sports and political unrest. Her pre-illness work showed technical mastery - these beautiful, detailed drawings of boxers and dogfights that explored violence and humanity through sport.

Then chronic illness hit. Hard. Bedridden. Multiple conditions spanning body systems. And her entire artistic trajectory shifted from documenting other people's struggles to documenting her own survival.

That pivot interests me because it's what happens when your body becomes the political territory you have to navigate. When daily existence becomes an act of resistance against systems that want you to disappear.

What Gets Documented vs What Gets Displayed

A second-year medical student asked the question I've been thinking about: Why paint the hard parts? Why not flowers and rainbows? Why show the medical equipment, the dehumanizing tests, the exhaustion?

Ashley's answer: "I need to get the imagery that's seared in my brain out."

Catharsis. The whole series is called that for a reason.

She makes cheerful sketches of food in her personal sketchbooks. She paints bouquets from the "Get Well Soon" series (though the title is ironic - chronic illness doesn't "get well"). But the public-facing work? That's processing trauma through paint. That's saying "this happened to my body and I'm making you look at it."

I get this completely. With Perceive Me, I asked over 100 artists to paint my plus-size body not because I wanted to make pretty pictures. I needed to process what it felt like to exist in a body that society wants to erase. The act of being seen - really seen, by multiple artists with different perspectives - was the work itself.

The Dog as Anchor

Rico and Rosie appear throughout Ashley's paintings. Her service dogs aren't just medical equipment with tails. They're hope. They're innocence. They're the through-line of stability when everything else in the painting shows chaos and pain.

One painting documents the months she was too sick to bond with Rico as a puppy. Calendar pages advance. The dog grows up. She's bedridden, missing everything. He becomes a service dog anyway.

The devastation of that. The guilt of illness taking away experiences you can't get back. But also the reality that the work got done - Rico learned his tasks, became her partner, shows up in every medical appointment now.

There's something profound about including the dogs in every piece. They ground the work in relationship instead of just documenting suffering. They show that disabled lives aren't only about pain - they're about connection, partnership, the daily reality of being cared for and caring back.

What Medical Students Need to See

This talk happened in a room full of future doctors. They're learning body systems right now - GI, neurology, whatever module aligns with Ashley's show in the gallery downstairs. The curriculum brings in artists whose work relates to what they're studying.

But what they're really learning is harder to quantify. They're seeing what it looks like when someone with multiple chronic conditions continues making art. When illness becomes material instead of obstacle. When a patient is also an advocate, an educator, a person with a full artistic practice that exists alongside medical trauma.

A second-year student stood up and said they also have chronic pain. Have had it since high school. That moment when someone in the room recognizes themselves in the work? That's why these exhibitions matter.

The Politics of Documentation

Ashley's work sits in a lineage I've been thinking about a lot. Mary Kelly documented motherhood when that labor was invisible. Theaster Gates documents Black cultural infrastructure when the art world ignores it. Your body becomes the site where you make political arguments about who gets seen, who gets valued, whose experiences become art.

Body-shaming is a multi-billion dollar industry. Ableism is baked into every system we navigate. The medical establishment routinely dehumanizes people with chronic illness, reduces them to symptoms and non-compliance and difficult patients.

Making art about chronic illness isn't therapeutic self-expression (though it can be that too). It's creating evidence that disabled lives are multidimensional and valuable. It's insisting that medical experiences belong in galleries, not just in hospitals where only healthcare workers see them.

What Advocacy Actually Looks Like

Ashley flew across the country while recovering from sepsis to talk about her work. That's not heroic inspiration porn. That's what disability advocacy requires - showing up when your body is screaming at you to stay home, because if you don't tell your own story, someone else will tell it wrong.

She stood there with Rico at her feet and talked medical students through vestibular tests and pain scales and the reality that chronic illness means she'll never "get well soon." That kind of visibility creates space for the next disabled artist, the next chronically ill medical student, the next person who needs to see themselves reflected in institutional spaces.

I think about this with my own work constantly. Every time I share Perceive Me, every time I write about eating disorder recovery, every time I document the process instead of just showing finished work - that's advocacy. It's making the invisible visible. It's claiming space in an art world that would rather we keep our struggles private.

Why We Need More of This

There aren't enough exhibitions about chronic illness. About disability. About the daily reality of navigating medical systems while trying to make art, hold down work, maintain relationships, survive.

The art world wants neat narratives. Recovery arcs. Before and after. But chronic illness doesn't work that way. Ashley's paintings show the ongoing nature of it - the repeated hospital visits, the accumulation of medical equipment, the way service dogs age alongside their handlers.

That sustained documentation matters. It builds authority through repetition. It says "this isn't a phase or a moment - this is my life, and it deserves the same artistic attention as any other subject."

The Question of How vs What

Ted Meyer kept pushing Ashley to talk about how she tells her story visually, not just what her medical conditions are. That shift in focus matters.

We don't need more tragedy narratives about disabled people. We need to understand the artistic methodologies disabled artists develop. The way chronic illness shapes creative practice. How someone like Ashley maintains a rigorous studio practice while dealing with conditions that could easily shut down her ability to make work.

The mixed media approach - combining acrylic, watercolor, gouache, ink, medical documentation, pharmaceutical labels, those emoji pain scales from 1-10. That's a language she developed to hold multiple realities at once: the medical, the emotional, the visual, the lived experience.

I recognize that methodology. It's what I do when I cut up my own paintings and reconstruct them. When I document 800 selfies with friends. When I make work about body image that includes the actual numbers and measurements and diet culture messaging that shaped my eating disorder.

You can't separate the how from the what. The process IS the advocacy.

Ashley Bravin's work is at USC's CAM building. Her website is ashleybravin.net and you should absolutely follow her on Instagram @ashleybravin.

If you're a disabled artist reading this, or a medical student trying to understand patient experience, or anyone who needs to see chronic illness treated as valid artistic subject matter - this is the work. Not perfect, not inspiring in that gross way ableism demands, just real.

And that reality? That's the most radical thing we can offer.

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Kristine Schomaker is an artist, curator, and founder of Shoebox Arts and Art and Cake magazine. Her ongoing project Perceive Me examines beauty standards and body image through social practice, and her work explores the intersection of art, community building, and personal healing.