Art in the
Operatory: Looking Beyond the Tooth
Don Dexter DMD, Eugene Dental Sleep Center/Don Dexter Gallery
By virtue of our training and our practice, dentists are artists.
We work every day
with proportion, contour, balance, texture, color, symmetry, negative space and
light. Over time, we develop an eye for details measured in fractions of
millimeters. W
e know when something
looks right, and we also know when something can be technically correct and still somehow feel wrong.
We spend our careers developing that artistic eye. But too often, it stops at the tooth.
Dentistry takes
place in a very controlled environment, and we care for a patient
population that often walks
through the door with some level of anxiety. We give considerable thought to
our technology, our clinical systems, efficiency, infection control and, of
course, the quality of the dentistry we provide. But I wonder how often we give
the same attention to the environment surrounding that care.
Patients experience much more
than the dentistry. They experience the reception area, the hallways, the treatment rooms,
the lighting, the colors and the things
we choose to place around them. All of it contributes to how
a practice feels.
And so does our team. Dentists
and staff spend thousands of hours in these spaces.
The environment we create isn't just for our patients. We live and work
in it too.
This is where I think art becomes interesting.
There is a
difference between decorating a dental office and curating one. Decoration
tends to answer the question
of what to put on an empty
wall. Curation starts
somewhere else: What do
we want this environment to feel like, and what belongs here?
That doesn't mean turning
a dental office
into an art gallery. In fact, good curation may mean
putting less on the walls, not more. It means considering the architecture,
scale, color, light, sightlines and negative space, and then choosing art
because it contributes something meaningful to the environment rather than
simply filling it.
Dentists already understand this way of thinking. We use it every day, only on a much smaller
scale.
There is another benefit that deserves consideration. When we choose original work from local artists, our investment stays within the community. It supports artists, galleries, framers and the broader creative ecosystem around us. Our practices can reflect something of the places and communities we serve rather than looking like they could exist anywhere.
But ultimately, this isn't an argument for dentists to buy more art.
It's an invitation to be more mindful about the spaces we create.
Maybe the opportunity isn't to make dentists more interested in art. We already are artists. The opportunity is to take the artistic
eye we have spent a career developing and widen its field of view—to become as
thoughtful about the environment surrounding our work as we are about the work
itself.
Look beyond the tooth.
