Branscome Companies

Earlier this year, more than 50 Branscome employees and spouses gathered together to create several brightly colored paintings for the nonprofit group Foundation for Hospital Art.

The foundation enlists volunteers to paint pre-drawn canvasses to brighten hospital walls around the world. Since 1984, over 300,000 volunteers and patients have created more than 30,000 paintings for 1,000 hospitals in 166 countries.

Several pieces of the artwork are now hanging at Shore Memorial Hospital and will provide a lasting memorial to Cindy Matthews, wife of Doug Matthews of Branscome Eastern Shore.

The four-foot work of art was dedicated to Doug’s wife in a May 29 ceremony at Shore Memorial Hospital. The paintings now hang in the fourth floor waiting area of the hospital, along with a plaque inscribed in Cindy’s memory.

Cindy was a home health care nurse for Shore Health Services until her untimely death last September when a tractor-trailer truck struck her vehicle at an intersection on the Eastern shore.

Six of the colorful panels which Branscome employees and spouses created were donated to Williamsburg’s Sentara Hospital and are now hanging on a wall of the hospital’s Imaging Department. Articles about the artwork, along with pictures of the panels, were published in the Virginia Gazette and Daily Press in late June.