Archive for the ‘Art’ Category

Jesse was working on a portrait and learning how to blend flesh colors so it looked real. Let’s practice on a snowman, I said, as I started mixing blue, red, yellow, and white to make a nice flesh color. I painted the outline of a snow man and filled it in and started blending in darker colors so the snowman looked rounded out. We ended up with what looked like a flesh colored snow man, that we decided to call “the naked snowman”. There were others sitting around the table. What a perfect topic and time for a limerick. We came up with rhyming words together and then put sentences to go with them. We posted it for everyone to enjoy.

There once was a naked snowman
Who wanted to get a suntan
He went out in the sun
And thought he’d have fun
But it wasn’t a very good plan.

I walked into the dining room of our long-term care unit and 3 or our residents signalled me to come over to their table.
“We would like to do a painting of the Last Supper.” one said.
I cringed when I thought about the detail. As we talked about it, we decided to do a collage using self-portraits and give it a little different twist.
“Jesus is in us.” another one said. “That means he will still be in the picture.”
We started doing self-portraits and placing them on the paper. We then used fabric scraps to glue on for clothing. We went through stacks of magazines to find just the right food for the table which was covered with a tablecloth made from the cloth napkins we use in the dining room. Pictured is what we came up with! Look for the cats. Along with one dog, they integrated 5 cats into the collage.

He wandered the facility troubled….didn’t know what to do. We put the easel up and placed his two bears on a chair. He loves those bears. In a few days he had a wonderful bear portrait and was smiling more

Mary Lou circles the building up and down all day long using her walker.
“Come and sit down,” I said, as I pulled up a chair at one of the dining room tables.
I knew she liked rhythm. I also knew that she played the piano for years and is constantly drumming her fingers in some kind of rhythm.
I placed a drum in front of her and gave her both drumsticks. I played a rhythm on the table and she played one back. We experimented with the natural rhythm of words, using songs and rhymes from childhood like “Pease Porridge Hot”. We tapped the rhythms without the words. As we drummed, more and more songs were popping into our heads.
“Listen to THIS one!” I said with gusto.
“What about THIS one!” Mary Lou would say.
We started drawing a crowd. I handed a tamborine to one of them and a shaker to another and before long, we had a rhythm band. It was made up of those who normally would not participate in organized activities. We sang. We talked. We laughed, and we listened to the overall effect of many instruments.

ARTICLE FOR Maximum Living Magazine