TEA Art Contest

TEA long-time board member Deborah Mosarski single-handedly organized the “Paint Your Pain” Art Contest by creating specific rules to ensure all entrants were given the same guidelines, establishing an all-volunteer, independent panel of judges with art backgrounds, then collecting the artwork for the judges’ panel and tallying the judges’ votes.

Why an art contest?

TEA’s first art contest was created in 2012 based on a request from the Research Team at Yale’s Center for Neuroscience and Regeneration Research (the group that is working toward new and effective treatments for EM).

The Yale Research Team presented its work at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience. Dr. Yang, a member of the team, explained that the group had a great desire to connect the attendees of the meeting to the actual pain suffered by those with EM. Therefore, the nature of the artwork requested for the contest was “depicting one’s expression of living with erythromelalgia.”

When Dr. Yang saw the artwork submitted by TEA members for the art contest, he said, “I can image that when these images are shown, it will for sure draw people’s emotion and promote the cause we are working on. This event demonstrates perfectly our combined effort between researchers and the patient community to fight against this disease.”

A very special thank you to the Yale Research Team, Dr. Yang, and Deborah Mosarski!