Professor Annabeth Rosen receives $25,000 Painters and Sculptors Grant

Exhibitions: New for winter quarter

By Dateline staff

By day, Peter Shahrokh works as the commissioning analyst at Design and Construction Management, working with engineers to ensure the university gets what it ordered in capital projects and that they function as intended.

On his own time, Shahrokh is a painter — and you can see a reproduction of one of his abstract watercolors on the cover of the December edition of Academic Medicine, the journal of the American Association of Medical Colleges.

The cover painting is titled Mindways, in which he said he conveys in “a somewhat whimsical way” the manner in which the brain functions under the influence of mood-stabilizing drugs.

In his artist’s statement, he noted his study of microphotography of brain sections and his use of some of the patterns that he sees within the images.

“I like to use bright colors to highlight the sparkling nature of thoughts, and I add other elements, like the koi and the pills seen in Mindways, which suggest the incipient ideas in the brain as the medication takes effect.”

Shahrokh is a self-taught painter, having started seven years ago, and now he is an instructor at the Craft Center. He has worked at Design and Construction Management for six and a half years. In addition to his duties as the commissioning analyst, he serves as the commissioning authority on projects for which the university is pursuing LEED certification (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design).

His wife, Narri, is chief administrative officer of the UC Davis Department of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences — and last year she told him that Academic Medicine was soliciting for cover images.

“I had one that I could link to medical academic interests, so I tossed it into the ring,” he said. “They responded positively in less than a couple of weeks.”

Their daughter, Alessia, is an analyst in Legal Affairs at the UC Davis Health System.

Online

Peter Shahrokh’s website