AN ARTISTIC LIFE

This is one of Jean Chapman's pastels of irises.

"The Winner," a polyform painted sculpture, by Jean Chapman

"Pregnant Female," sculpture made from walnut, by Jean Chapman

In the sixth grade at the old Campus School, Jean Chapman was artist enough to be placed into college art classes. For a career, he chose the art of medicine over other kinds for his career, but art has continued to be meaningful in his life.

"The humanities equip a person to be a physician far more than qualitative analysis does," Chapman says.

A retrospective of the work Chapman has done since his boyhood is on display during June at Gallery 100, located at 119 Independence St. in Cape Girardeau. The exhibit includes sculpture, oil paintings of Maine and Sausalito, pastels and drawings.

Chapman was a precocious youngster who was a starter on the football team all his years at Central High School. On the undefeated but thrice-tied Central High School team of 1946, his teammates included Stephen Limbaugh, now a federal judge, and Jack Little, who became a colonel in the Missouri Highway Patrol.

"What made that team good was we were smart," he says.

The football player also played bass in the high school orchestra, sang in the choir and was editor of the newspaper, the Tiger.

"That was the beginning of the humanities' importance to me," he said.

Chapman's father was the superintendent of buildings and grounds at Southeast, an uneducated man who appreciated his son's ability to work with his hands. He gave Jean the money to buy the primary colors for his first paintings.

Why he knew art would not be his career is still a painful memory. His mother didn't like the wrinkles he'd included in a portrait of her and asked him to burn the painting. When he said he couldn't, she did.

"That said what she thought of an art career," he said.

He attended Southeast and eventually pursued medicine but remembers an art history as probably the best course of his academic career. "It opened my eyes," he said.

He would discover that the "facts" he assimilated well enough to graduate from the medical school at Washington University Medical in 1953 changed every few years as more was learned about the causes of disease. But the humanities were immutable.

"The relationship you have with your patient is the healing power," Chapman says. "The medicine is the tool."

None of Chapman's four children has followed his artistic lead, though he has filled their homes with his work. "They are appreciators of art," he says.

His wife, Nona, is a talented singer.

Some of Chapman's work expresses his love for the female form in an age in which nudity often is equated with pornography. This notion is distasteful to him, so much so that he gave his outdoor sculpture "Elizabeth" to Southeast instead of to Southeast Missouri Hospital because some members of the hospital board had voted not to accept it.

Now retired, he spent last semester as a teacher's helper at Southeast and is working on a new marble sculpture in the yard beside his house. That is where he spent 2 1/2 years sculpting "Elizabeth"'s curves and breasts and hands from Kimmswick limestone.

If Chapman has a signature it is his sculptures of hands. A former president of the American College of Allergy and Immunology, Chapman has been commissioned by one of his colleagues in the national administration to sculpt the hands of her husband, Cho-Liang Ling, a celebrated violinist from Taiwan.

Aside from a small show at the public library 20 years ago, this is the first public exhibit of Chapman's work. Two of his sculptures also are in the touchable sculpture exhibit currently at the University Museum.

Chapman retired in 1997, seven years after suffering a heart attack. Half of those who have congestive heart failure are dead after eight years. His sense of good fortune to be alive has affected both him and his work.

"I quit putting things off," he says.