At Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo, New York, patients receive lifesaving care in the institution’s treatment rooms. And in some of those rooms, behind the medical equipment and practitioners bustling in and out, a special sort of health care intervention works its own magic: bright, inspirational murals depicting wide open windows to the outside world.
The murals are painted and installed by artist Colleen Wall, whose decades-long journey with health and the arts began with her own cancer diagnosis. The mother of two was diagnosed in 1995 while pregnant with her second daughter, and found that the only way she could escape from the all-consuming anxiety surrounding her condition was through creating art.
“My older daughter handed me a crayon and asked me to color with her one day,” Wall shared with Nice News. “And as we were sitting there coloring for 15, 20 minutes, I realized for the first time since my diagnosis, I hadn’t thought about cancer.” So she began coloring a little bit every day to “get her mind into a better place.”
Fast forward to 2008, and Wall, who’d been working in marketing while writing and illustrating children’s books on the side, was looking for a new career opportunity. She was out to dinner with a friend discussing her desire to somehow give back to the community with her art, and wondered aloud if there was a way she could foray her talents into health care.
“The next morning, the very next morning, I opened my email and there was a call for artists to work in this newly formed arts and health care program,” Wall recounted. “Which was — coincidences don’t exist, I don’t believe. And so I felt like it was really meant to be.”
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She immediately threw her hat in the ring, and within a few months, she was an artist in residence on the oncology floor of the Women’s and Children’s Hospital of Buffalo, facilitating children and families in finding comfort through art, just as she had. During her tenure there, on a “beautiful spring morning after a really long winter,” something happened that would inspire her current creative endeavor.
“I walked into [the room of] a patient whom I’d worked with from the very first day I was at the hospital,” Wall explained. “I walked into her room and I said, ‘Oh my God, it’s such a beautiful day outside.’ And she was in a very low spot, and she looked up at me and said, ‘It always looks the same from here.’”
Wall left the hospital in 2011, but that exchange stuck with her, and two years after moving on, she had an idea for how people like that patient might experience some of the same joy she’d felt that spring day: If they couldn’t look out on the natural world, she’d bring the natural world to them. Specifically, she’d paint bright landscape murals, or as she calls them, “LandEscapes,” and install them in hospitals. She got on Kickstarter to raise money for the effort, and soon enough, her massive, colorful paintings were gracing the walls of local hospitals.
Eventually, Wall evolved her idea. Thinking of the fact that patient rooms are often windowless, she began creating smaller paintings that depict the view outside an open window. And in November 2024, nine of those artworks — which she paints on static clings rather than directly on walls, so they can be sanitized and disinfected — went up in treatment rooms at Roswell Park.
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“I want them to feel transported,” she said of the patients who look at her work. “I want them to have that — remember I talked about that little respite that I had after my diagnosis — just to have that minute, that maybe one of the windows reminds them of a place that they went to in their lifetime or that they dreamed about going to. And they can get into their imagination and go to that place.”
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