HALIFAX -- At first blush, art and science seem a peculiar pair, but hip Halifax painter Mitchell Wiebe seems comfortable at work in the Alzheimer's wing of the city's veterans' hospital.

The drab room where his colourful, interpretive paintings hang is crammed with hospital beds and equipment because nearby rooms are being cleaned. Wiebe is the only person here on this frigid Maritime night, other than a janitor, as he shows a visitor the art he has created amid the comings and goings of the memory-disability clinic at the Queen Elizabeth II Health Sciences Centre.

For the past 12 months, Wiebe, a painter, poet and musician, has been an integral part of the clinic's work, depicting the neurological condition using canvas, brush and oils, as part of the hospital's artist-in-residence program.

This innovative addition to Alzheimer's research is the brainchild of staff physician Dr. Ken Rockwood, professor of geriatric medicine at Dalhousie University and the school's chief Alzheimer's researcher.

Rockwood says the artist-in-residence program has been a vastly worthwhile experiment. The idea came to him several years ago while he was making a short film called Dancing Inside: An Alzheimer's Story with a friend. Through promoting that project, he discovered painter Jennifer Hiscox, whose work Ghosts moved him deeply.

He hired Hiscox on an informal basis to visit the clinic and paint her observations, paying her for pieces as she completed them. He was trying to forge a more creative research environment, and he got it. The piece was dark and moody and unnerved some patients so much it had to be taken down.

"She spent time with us at the clinic and then went away to paint," Rockwood says. "It was incredibly insightful. She painted a very interesting portrait of a fairly chaotic thing that happened. We wound up telling a man his mother had Alzheimer's when he himself was not prepared to hear it. It became apparent that she didn't know who he was. Jennifer painted a brilliant piece that became very important in the evolution of the way we thought about that process. A hundred questionnaires wouldn't get you that insight."

Some of the paintings are hopeful. Hiscox also depicted the successes of drug therapy, showing a woman who remembered how to play the piano after Alzheimer's had devoured her memory of that skill.

After this first experiment, Rockwood decided the hospital needed a formal way of dealing with art, and so set up a committee of local artists to select the artist-in-residence each year. Next year's artist, Halifax sculptor Sarah Maloney, who focuses on human anatomy and works mostly in fabrics, has already been selected to take over the position when Wiebe is finished.

Last year's artist, Halifax painter Renée Forrestall, became personally involved with the patients and tried to depict how they themselves saw the disease. One of her pieces shows a couple sketching out their dream house in the sand on the beach. In the centre of the scene is a woman being fed with a spoon, wearing a look of serenity. It conveys an emotional conundrum: how we predicate our future happiness on the plans we make years before.

Rockwood says the work gets at a question that he and his colleagues have been trying to sort out for some time: How do Alzheimer's patients see their future?

"That appears to be one of the things that comes about from treatment -- they see the future as impoverished and bleak," he says. "The artwork has given us a window into that which we wouldn't otherwise have. From a teaching standpoint it's very helpful. The use of metaphor is pervasive in art and it's pretty important in science.

"It invites a whole new culture of observation into the hospital," he adds. "It brings tremendous creativity. There would be no new research without creativity. The mixing of art and science may seem unique, but it's actually a natural and important combination.

"We see pretty poignant things in the course of a day. It comes from the dialogue around the pieces."

Unlike his predecessors in the artist-in-residence program, Wiebe spent most of his time focusing on basic science. "In doing that he has really opened up new vistas for us," Rockwood says.

Trees figure prominently in the pieces Wiebe has produced over the past year. "I thought a tree would be good because everyone has a story about a tree," he explains. "As trees get older they become gnarled and more sculptural and I thought it was a good metaphor for aging."

Wiebe's paintings offer an internal landscape of the disease that a half-million Canadians over 65 are expected to suffer from by 2031. Most of the works are emotional, jarringly so, inspired by the experiences he has had with patients. They are a synthesis of various stories.

And some of them actually investigate the neurological side of the disease. Wiebe spent time in the hospital's brain bank, examining grey matter as part of his research. As a result, synapses and neurons are the subjects of a few pieces.

Wiebe, 35, was born in Calgary but moved to Halifax to study at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design. He seems an unlikely candidate for hanging out with elderly Alzheimer's patients and embracing them as subjects. Demented teddy bears often figure in his other work.

"The first day I came here I was pretty nervous," he says. "These people are vulnerable and you want to take the utmost respect and care. It was hard. The disease is so sad and it was difficult some days to come in. It's often a matter of life and death here."

Wiebe visited the clinic about once a week, talking with patients, sitting in on private visits with their physicians, listening to their stories, and even attending tea parties. Sometimes he would talk to people briefly as they were rolling by in their wheelchairs. Many didn't remember who he was from visit to visit.

Wiebe himself was a bit of an oddity around the place for a while. Although some patients grew used to the program, many would watch through a window as he painted in a cramped studio just off the hospital's main hallway.

Ultimately, the setup proved too distracting for him. So he mostly sketched at the hospital, did some painting there, and then finished it in his own studio.

"Some were really interested in the work and others found the paintings kind of scary," he says. "And some of them treated me as though as I was actually a doctor."

Wiebe's 83-year-old grandmother, who has suffered from Alzheimer's for the past five years, was part of his motivation for seeking out the hospital job.

"The fact that my art could influence a doctor's perspective on the brain and potentially even help forge new directions in research is exciting," he says. "It's an honour to be in this position."

Though the program seems to work well in Nova Scotia, Rockwood isn't sure it would work everywhere. "One of the things about this part of the world is there's a strong arts tradition," he says.

"That is very helpful. There's a general sense here no one's going to harm you. The patients are generally happy to have an ally."