A Life Saver, In His Fashion

Designer Carmen Marc Valvo Turns Cancer Into Inspiration

(CBS)  It's often said that art imitates life. As The Early Show co-anchor René Syler found out, sometimes that's exactly the point.

This week, The Saturday Early Show's Saturday Spotlight falls on fashion designer Carmen Marc Valvo for his work with other, very special artists.

Valvo is a designer to the stars, dressing some of the country's leading ladies, including Beyonce Knowles, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Oprah Winfrey and, for this year's Oscars, Queen Latifah.

But this week in New York, he was on hand to honor lesser known artists and their paintings, which were inspired by a cause close to his heart.

In the fall of 2003, Valvo was getting ready to launch his fall collection, but he knew something just wasn't right.

"My body clock was off, my internal clock was off," he recalls, "and even though I didn't have any traditional symptoms, I insisted on having a colonoscopy."

He was still a year shy of the age for a recommended screening and that insistence probably saved his life.

"At age 49," says Valvo, "they found a lemon-sized growth in my colon, and the doctor said to me, 'You have cancer.' "

Valvo quickly had the tumor removed. The next weeks and months were uncertain. With his health up in the air, Valvo turned to a comfort zone to ease his anxiety.

"But, strangely, I found two outlets," he explains. "One was my fashion design, and the second was my garden. That summer, I was in the garden non-stop. I wanted to see things grow and blossom, and that helped me, physically, overcome my anxiety, my fear. And also I took that interpretation and the whole collection for the spring was an homage to my garden."

Valvo beat the disease, but didn't go public until last year, when he broke his silence with he highest-profile advocate for colon cancer awareness, new CBS News anchor Katie Couric.

This week, Valvo was a celebrity judge for Snapshot of Survival, a national art competition sponsored by Gilda's Club Worldwide. The artists are survivors of colon cancer and their friends and family. Their art, like Valvo's spring collection, is inspired by living with the disease.

Syler, commenting how interesting it is that people who are in the fight of their lives many times are so creative, asked Valvo how hard it was for him to just the art competition.

His reply: "Oh, it was almost impossible to judge this contest, because you cannot equate somebody's artist ability coupled with the sentiments that accompany the artwork and their own personal struggle in a situation like this. For me, it was so personal. I was re-living the pain, the pain, this person's pain, and the joy."

Patty McClelen's painting won an honorable mention, but it was a portrait by her sister, Janis Thomas, that earned top honors.

Snapshot of Survival: just one way Valvo is trying to change people's lives.

"It's a cancer that is so curable if detected early," he says. "You need to find it early, you need to be testing. It's something not to be afraid of. Knowledge is definitely power."