When there is pain, depression, or anxiety, art can soothe and heal. If allowed the freedom to do what is within, a specific style emerges over and over.

Pat says she likes people. She paints hundreds of them, lined up and with lots of color.

Laura over comes her fears and depression by letting paint flow from her brush in squiggly lines. The picture shown is only one of many that she has painted. Her eyes get happy when she paints.

Grizley is bedridden. The only way he is able to get through his day is through detailed drawings, usually cartoon style, highly detailed. It takes hours. He HAS hours, of course.

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.

I obtain large pieces of cardboard for free from Cannon Industries. They are painted white and placed on easels for those who are in Alzheimer Units to paint on. I give them big brushes and let them go with the color. Ann, one of the residents, painted with yellow and was finished. Because we had a group who was watching and commenting, together we developed it into a sailboat picture. That is what the spontaneous shapes of yellow reminded us of. It had turned into a group art project and I like the result.

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.

When painting recreationally without inhibition, the inner self naturally comes out. A large piece of card board was placed in front of Catherine with her choice of colors. Catherine’s art evolved like a well-rounded symphony…especially when she was doing it. Her brush, unintentionally, it seems, became a baton and she was waving the colors onto the painting rhythmically. When she got ahold of the pink, she was dabbing it on with an artistic flair. “A little here, and a little up here,” she said as she jabbed her brush in the upper left-hand corner. I found out later that Catherine’s long life was lived immersed in music. She played the marimba most of her life and taught and directed children’s choirs. That explains a lot!

“Painting is so other people can see what your thoughts are. I don’t think about what I am going to do… I just get quiet and the thoughts come out through the paint. It’s a surprise.”

Ardis quickly identified with me when we did art together. We found ourselves at a table painting, each one of us in our own little worlds. She is 90 years old and paints out of her soul. She is not concerned with her art being a little different….almost surreal. She is going for the “process”….the process of creating… creating in the moment….not even planning it all out….just letting her picture evolve.

She looked at me while I was painting and called me a “thwarted messer arounder” I asked her what she meant. She said, “You are living the creative life as an adult, the life that was thwarted in you as a child.” I said, “How did YOU know?”

She looked at me with penetrating eyes and said, “I don’t know how I knew that. I just do.”

Perhaps she was thwarted in some ways too, and she now has time and freedom to paint what she calls whimsical paintings. The one below started with a memory of when she and her best friend took their cats and dolls into the woods and had a picnic. What started out to be a tree turned into a rainbow. She added more “figurines” later.