Doris is in the habit of quietly sitting in front of an empty page of watercolor paper for up to an hour before she picks up the brush. I am aware that the creative juices are being stirred. Without fanfare, she starts painting and a landscape emerges in a very short time. Each landscape is a different color hue. “This is a fallen tree at dusk” she said. I held it up in front of her and asked if she was happy with it. She nodded her head and said that the trunk needed to be wider. She fell asleep before she could finish. The picture is still very charming. The painting pictured below is a tree that she painted very quickly all in blue.

I was sitting with 2 residents in an Alzheimer’s Unit.
“Let’s write a haiku poem. Look out the window at all the snow. What do you think of the snow? How does it make you feel? What does it remind you of?”
I received feedback: Ice cream, cold, have to wear a coat, kinda wet, falling ice, snowball, winter, dead.
“What would you compare it to?”
My sister sleeping.
“Is the snow sleeping?”
Yes
It also has energy
“For what?”
To make the grass grow in the spring.

I began writing their words in the 5 syllables, then 7 syllables, then 5 syllables. Here is our Haiku poem.
Peaceful snow sleeping
Watering seeds for Spring
Waiting for flowers.
We got the paints out and painted flowers coming out of the snow.

I go frequently to a facility that has a good mixture of men and women. I find it interesting that the ones who clamor to paint are men. We decided to call in Men’s Club. They gather and paint…and even allow the women to come and watch. As they paint together, they socially bond as they come alive to the arts. Notice that one gentleman is painting a portrait of the other.

One day I set up easels in the lounge of the nursing home where I work. We used large pieces of cardboard and large brushes. The goal is to enjoy the fluidity of the paint and watchthe colors flow. The instructions were “Just have fun with it. You can’t do it wrong.” I then added, “If you don’t like it, you can throw it away and try again.” No pressure. As one of the easels became available, I pushed Netta up to the easel. The nurses were shaking their heads at me. “She can’t do it,” someone whispered in my ear. I thought it wasn’t going to hurt to try. She painted for 45 minutes without stopping. She put paint on top of paint and watched the colors change. Netta, a woman who recently had not been able to focus on anything, was engrossed. The next week, she finished the painting….another 45 minutes.