J. Kim Sessums, MD, has three half-finished pastel drawings in his clinic office and an armature for modeling clay in the hospital’s call room.

“I’ve figured out how to work in small blocks of time,” said the Brookhaven OB/GYN, who over the past two decades has built a parallel career as a noted artist and sculptor.

“Medicine is my career, but I also had a passion to create art,” Sessums said. “And when there’s a creative impulse in you, it’s going to find a way out.”

A native of the Forest area, Sessums practices as part of Brookhaven OB-GYN Associates. He holds a medical degree from the University of Mississippi Medical Center and completed his internship at Charity Hospital in New Orleans through the Tulane University School of Medicine. He completed his residency at Charity Hospital and at UMMC, and is board certified by the American Board of Obstetrics & Gynecology. Today he serves patients in his clinic and at King’s Daughters Medical Center in Brookhaven.

Meanwhile, Sessums has earned acclaim as an artist, and particularly for his work in public art and sculpture. In 2004, he was selected to create a memorial to African-American soldiers’ contributions during the Civil War, now installed at the Vicksburg National Military Park. His public works have also included busts of former U.S. Rep. G.V. “Sonny” Montgomery at Mississippi State University and at the Camp Shelby Military Museum in Hattiesburg, as well as a six-foot-tall statue of Ole Miss football coach Johnny Vaught on the University of Mississippi campus.

Sessums’ busts of artist Andrew Wyeth, author Eudora Welty and evangelist Rev. Billy Graham were part of those individuals’ collections.

He also sculpted the likeness of Mississippi baseball legend Dave “Boo” Ferriss for the Mississippi Sports Hall of Fame Museum in Jackson. A trophy-size casting is presented annually to the Mississippi Collegiate Baseball Player of the Year.

Likewise, Sessums’ Bailey Howell Trophy is presented to the Mississippi Collegiate Men’s Basketball Player of the Year. His Backyard Brawl trophy is held by the winner of each year’s football game between rivals Millsaps College and Mississippi College.

For Sessums, while the artistic side of his life has been ever present, as a young man he hadn’t intended to go into medicine.

After high school, he began studying architecture at Mississippi State University. It wasn’t quite the right fit.

Sessums soon transferred to Belhaven College, where he played basketball and began studying biology. A scrub-tech job at a local hospital turned him on to medicine, and he started down that path by applying to the University of Mississippi Medical Center.

There, his training would also prove relevant for his work as an artist, particularly as a sculptor of the human form.

“When we go through gross anatomy and when we do surgery, we work with site-specific knowledge,” he said. “But when I began to work in sculpture, I also needed to have artistic anatomy — to understand where the muscles lie under the skin. So I did go back and refresh my memory in that way.”

Sessums began working in three-dimensional art about 15 years ago, building upon his two-dimensional skills in drawing and painting. While studying under figurative artist Richard MacDonald in Carmel, Calif., Sessums surprised his instructor by catching on quickly to those anatomical concepts.

“I kept knowing the answers to his questions,” Sessums said. “I finally had to let the cat out of the bag and tell him I was a doctor.”

On the flip side, most of his patients in Brookhaven are aware of his work as an artist — so much so, he’s had to bolster his practice against people’s assumptions he was going to retire from medicine and pursue art full-time.

Still, most of his patients like to talk with him about his work, whether it’s commenting on a gallery show or remarking on the abstract and experimental pieces he hangs on the clinic walls.

“For someone to say, ‘That means something to me as a person. I’m changed by having seen that work of art’ — that’s what I really long for,” Sessums said.

Sessums’ training in art has been largely self-taught. In college, he informally studied composition, art history and photography under Jon Whittington at Belhaven. He has also studied with his friend, artist Stephen Scott Young, in Jupiter, Fla.

Today, Sessums fits his two careers together in creative ways, keeping smaller works-in-progress handy at both the clinic and the hospital. It’s all about having the pieces and tools within arm’s reach whenever a bit of time opens up, whether it’s waiting for a patient’s labor to progress or having downtime when someone cancels an appointment.

“If I have 20 minutes, I’ve already got all my tools set up,” he said. “I can focus in fairly quickly on blocking in a drawing or doing finish work on a lip or eyelid. I’ve learned to be able to do that — and then at a moment’s notice, when the nurse sticks her head in, I can walk away and go take care of patients.”

The pieces in his “ambulatory studio” include small-scale studies for some of Sessums’ monumental works. The setup works surprisingly well given the unpredictable nature of an OB/GYN practice.

“If I’m stuck four hours waiting for someone to deliver a baby, I’m working on something,” he said. “It’s not that I wake up and think, ‘How can I be the most productive?’ but I’m blessed that God made my mind to work where I can focus for short periods of time.”

Back at home, his studio houses larger works-in-progress, such as a collection of found objects he has been assembling into a sculpture this fall. His four children are grown and have left home, but his wife, Kristy, often joins him in the studio.

“She loves hanging around out there, telling me what’s working and what’s not,” he said.

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