At first glance, Laura Olear’s painting look simply like colorful abstract art. This one looks vaguely like raspberries, rendered larger-than-life in dark red and bluish-green. That one could be the inside of a walnut. Another looks like a beehive.
But a closer look at a description hanging next to a ghoulish mask reveals it to be a massively inflated rendering of Mononucleosis. Those raspberries are actually Herpes. The walnuts are HIV. The beehive is a virus related to E. Coli.
Olear’s “Pathological Processes” is a series of digital prints, watercolors and large-scale oil paintings hanging in the Ebling Library. The art lines the hallways around the second floor of the Health Sciences Learning Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.