Posts Tagged ‘Alzheimer’s and art’

We just “happened” onto the topic of marbles last week. My artist friend arranged to bring her extensive collection. She said her oldest one was made out of clay. The next week, we sat around a table and made swirly clay marbles. We colored the clay and rolled it out and then made it into a jelly roll shape. We cut the jelly roll in small pieces and the marbles became swirly as we rolled them. The scientific part was realizing they did not roll as well as the glass marbles. The glass marbles wouldn’t stay on the table. We rolled long snake like boundaries for the marbles and then made up our own games with mazes and of course the traditional circle. It was a fun afternoon. It could have gone on for hours as different Alzheimer’s patients wandered in and out and puttered with the soft clay and the hard marbles.

Mary was recovering in bed for many weeks. I have known her for years and she had not ever tried her hand at painting, except for painting walls. I surprised her when I came into her room. I told her I had a big piece of cardboard and big brushes and paints. “Would you like to paint?”

“Well, I guess so,” she replied cooperatively. “You can’t do it wrong.”

I spread a plastic garbage bag over her sheet and I held the cardboard. She picked up the big brush and started painting with red. She picked up another brush with yellow in it and watched things change from red to orange. More colors appeared as she experimented. When she was finished, we looked at it from all directions and our imaginations went wild. We hung it on her wall.