Amid a frightening pandemic, after a stolen spring, and during a troubled summer, Iris Arts offers potentially restorative images of nature.
Summer has arrived and we at Iris Arts are finally ready to launch our website! Our goal is to diminish the stress, anxiety, and suffering of patients and staff in the healthcare environment by providing evidence-based, restorative images of nature for visual distraction.
Not an Iris, but a rhododendron. A springtime sign of calm and beauty during a frightening pandemic. Photo © Donald J. Rommes
Our photographers have spent many years making and collecting thousands of images of nature. Over the last twelve months, we tasked our physician/photographer team to review every one of those images for artistic and technical quality. We then asked them to identify those that met generally accepted criteria for display in the healthcare environment. Only photographs that met both criteria are now available for purchase at Iris Arts.
While this is a cause for celebration at Iris Arts, we fully recognise this is a very challenging time for the health of the United States and the world. When we wrote our first blog entry on March 19th, the coronavirus pandemic was just beginning. At the time, there were 11,000 confirmed cases in the United States and 155 deaths. In the 14 weeks since, 2.3 million more people have been infected in this country and 123,000 of them have died from the disease. Many hundreds of thousands more have been hospitalised, overwhelming some hospital systems, and causing great stress and suffering to healthcare providers and their patients.
Our hearts go out to all who have been affected by this terrible scourge—that is to say, to everyone. This will eventually pass, but we are still in the midst of the crisis and more suffering will have to be endured before things improve.
For those stressed staff struggling to get through this terrible time, we can only hope that the opportunity to look at an image of nature will provide a pleasant distraction—however fleeting—and a reminder of a happier time.
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