For many, the formative dreams of becoming a successful artist or creative, no matter the medium, were written off years ago. We get up. We go to work. We come home exhausted. This cycle repeats, despite the unused paints and canvases in the corner, the camera collecting dust on the dresser, or that unfinished novel on the computer.

Have a conversation with artist C Fodoreanu and one might walk away either feeling inspired or resigned to their creative hiatus.

Just home after working at his day job as a pediatric physician, he speaks about all of his creative endeavors as if he has no choice but to pursue them as well. Outside of the hospital, he is a skilled photographer, but he also works in sculptural and video art. To hear him tell it, the demands of his career have never suppressed his creativity. If anything, they are symbiotic, one fueling the other and vice versa.

“I often look at them as the same dreams, but from different angles,” says Fodoreanu, whose full name is Andrei Cornel Fodoreanu. “It’s part of the same journey of reaching for the truth, whatever that might be, but different ways of getting to it. Art is medicine and medicine is art.”

“I don’t turn myself off from being an artist when I’m at work,” he adds later. “I’m the same, but maybe when I come home, some of the insights I have from work will translate into something artistic, something visual. I’ll take the time to express it instead of keeping it inside.”

Listening to Fodoreanu recount his life is equal parts beguiling and inspiring in that he’s managed to pursue both his passions (medicine and art) with uniform enthusiasm. What’s more, he’s done so while assimilating into American life after immigrating to the U.S. from, of all places, Transylvania, Romania.

“It really was a magical place,” says Fodoreanu, who grew up “very close” to Bran Castle, the medieval fortress that is most commonly associated with the fictional Count Dracula.

Vampire associations aside, Fodoreanu says growing up in the region laid an artistic foundation that persisted throughout his life. His photographic work is moody and wistful, dark but expressively romantic. When he was still a young boy, he learned the practice of glass iconographic painting and developed a love of poetry and music. He was also fascinated with his dad’s analog film camera, and eventually began using it to take pictures of nature and the people that fascinated him.

“It was winter and I think I was trying to take pictures of the mountains or something, and I don’t think I knew exactly how to roll the film in the camera,” Fodoreanu recalls, adding that his naïveté on how to operate the camera resulted in double exposed images that looked moody, but still evocative. “For me, that was powerful and I fell in love with it.”

One of the places he often found inspiring was the nearby Lake Sacalaia. Also known as Pike’s Lake, Fodoreanu describes it as a “magical” but “religious” place that he loved visiting as a child despite its associations with strange apparitions, mythical creatures and what he describes as “eerie silences.” Look up the lake online and it’s often referred to as the “Loch Ness of Transylvania.”

“We spent lots of summer at that lake,” says Fodoreanu. “We didn’t have cell phones at that point, of course. We didn’t even have TVs. So for us, we would fish and spend time at the lake.”

This age of innocence, however, was shattered when the Romanian revolution began in 1989. Also known as the Christmas Revolution, it saw the people overthrowing the Communist government, but not before hundreds were killed and thousands injured by government fighters and secret police. For Fodoreanu, who was a teenager at the time, it marked the first time he became fascinated with the fragility of existence and the very human desire to repair and preserve it.

“For the first time ever, I was seeing dead bodies. The insides of human bodies,” Fodoreanu recalls. “There was a sense of ‘why them?’ and ‘why not me?’ It drew me to the human body in a fascinating way. It became more of a preoccupation with the inner workings of the human body, not just the magical aspects. I wanted to fix things, to put it back together and that made me want to be a doctor.”

Just after he completed high school in Romania, his family moved to Los Angeles. Fodoreanu eventually attended the University of California San Diego and then went on to Harvard Medical School, graduating in 2011. Still, that ineffable fascination with what lay beyond the body, whether it was rooted in spiritualism or magic, continued to press upon him.

Years after moving back to San Diego and beginning his medical career, he visited Transylvania just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Once he was back in San Diego, and during the lockdowns in the early days of the pandemic, he began to sort through a “dusty old box” of photographic negatives from his youth. He says looking at them again transported him “back through time.”

“It not only connected me back to the legends of the lake, how important it was for me to have a space like that growing up, but also how I was thinking at that point. What kind of dreams and ideas I had,” Fodoreanu recalls. “Is that boy proud of who I am right now?”

He distilled these existential deliberations into “Ode to the Lake Sacalaia,” a book that includes analogue and digital photography, as well as video stills, essays and poetry. Divided into four sections, Fodoreanu seamlessly explores memory and present tense, his grainy analogue images lovingly contrasted with his current works of bodies in motion. The contents of the book were further curated and presented this year at a gallery show at the Ronald H. Silverman Fine Arts Gallery on the Cal State University, Los Angeles campus.

In one of the poetic passages from the book, entitled “Queerly,” Fodoreanu explores memory and what he calls a “new humanism.”

“We are the same,

me and you,

you and me,

same height,

same eyes,

same heart beat

both on the same side,

almost alike, sky. Same love,

and pain, mostly unfulfilled,

mostly pain, drenched.

The lake then does its trick:

grains and shines, splits and seeds,

whirls and beats; bits and shadows,

tears and scars, mine. You,

adding to my equation.”

He extends this humanistic outlook to his other creative endeavors as well.

He curated a studio show in 2019 called “street smart,” with proceeds benefiting an educational fund for young artists. This led more recently to “water hands,” a body of work where he collaborated with a group of at-risk youth to photograph their hands while they thought of their past and what their hopes were for the future. The results were recently displayed at the Medical Education and Telemedicine Building (MET) at the UCSD School of Medicine.

In addition to the show, Fodoreanu was also asked to give a presentation about the work at the inaugural Sidney L. Saltzstein, MD Endowed Lecture on Compassionate Care. He has even added sculpture to his repertoire, creating a massive stainless steel piece (“cor fabrica”) depicting the human body.

“I’m even working on a play,” says Fodoreanu, laughing. “Wagner said that theater is the ultimate art form and I kind of agree with that.”

For Fodoreanu, there isn’t at all a sense of staying in a particular lane. He sees both of his lives, the medical and the artistic, as a means of giving back and embracing the universality of humanity. And while they might seem to most people like very different dreams, he can’t help but think they’re one and the same.

“That’s kind of the goal as an artist,” he remarks. “To take that empathy and message of my medical practice and spread it around through my art.”

Name: C Fodoreanu

Born: Cluj-Napoca, Romania

Fun Fact: In addition to both his art and medical practice, Fodoreanu also recently found the time to go back to school and is completing his MFA thesis at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Combs is a freelance writer.