2018-04-08 Meeting

Art Therapy with Don Stevens & Lynn Murphy

14 people present

Lynn: Art therapy may not at first look like it’s related to the Elderberries community. But art therapy can help us with some of the common experiences of aging - the gradual or sudden loss of physical ability, pain, emotional loss due to bereavement, etc. But art is something that many of us haven’t been involved with - for a variety of reasons. Maybe we think we have no artistic ability. Maybe we are afraid of revealing ourselves. But through art therapy we find that we don’t need to be great at art in order to express ourselves. I’ve benefited a lot from this, and I wanted to share it with you.

I'd like to introduce Don Stevens who was the art volunteer at the QEII who introduced me to art therapy.

And also to help us is Jennifer Dingle, who has framed all of these pieces and will be showing each one as I discuss it.

Don Stevens

I started out as a teacher many years ago, which brought home the importance of art to me. In the ‘70s, getting a teaching job in Halifax was nigh impossible. Out in West Northfield, one of my students always felt that he could do nothing right, and one day he said, “Mr Stevens, I didn’t know how great I could be until I was in your class.” So - he thought he was great there, and that spread to him feeling like he could be great anywhere.

I integrated art into every subject that I taught. Many years later, I felt that I wanted to do art myself, and formed a volunteer group for people involved with the AIDS Coalition - not just those with HIV, but everyone involved. Everyone was welcome. People were able to express their emotions in a way that they wouldn’t be able to use words. People could talk about their issues in the context of the art. Later I found a place with Cancer Care and the QEII Pain Management Clinic.

What is Art Therapy? The person who does this has to have a lot of empathy - which possibly can’t be taught. You need to “know your own darkness” to feel that of others.

This isn’t going to take away pain, and it’s not going to cure cancer — but it can help you cope. If people feel they’re with others in the same boat, they can feel better.

What *isn’t* art therapy? Well, even if you feel like you can’t do art, you can still do art therapy. You may learn a thing or two about colour and perspective, but you won’t turn into Bob Ross. It also isn’t crafts to keep you busy - no macaroni soldiers (unless you want to make macaroni soldiers).

To do this in groups, you have to have a safe, positive environment. Participants have to feel like they can talk about their pain. But, maybe not, for example, some kind of abuse as a child. Sometimes memories like this surface, but are too much to handle within the group. You share as much as you want to share.

The groups should be small - any more than seven or eight people may be too many. Typically you can’t use oil paint or water colour, so I use everything else, mostly tempera paint- mixes with water - or acrylics. You can get some really good materials at the Dollar Store — except for the brushes. You probably want to invest in some nice brushes.

And, rituals : do rituals if they work for you, don’t if they don’t.

In an Open Studio approach, people can just drop in at any time during the day.

The Directive Approach: I give a directive on theme or topic and we all work on the same idea together. Or, we do quotations, for example, “Remember that everyone you meet is afraid of something, loves something, and has lost something.” — H. Jackson. You can see that you could do three drawings, a triptych, around that quote.

Sometimes we restrict materials, e.g. clay, or masks. Think about having the outside of the mask representing your outside person, and the inside of the mask representing your inside feelings. You could also do this with a dollar store box. But even in those situations, if a member of the group wants to do something different, they can. The directive will often be a useful place to get someone going. It’s one of many ways for that. Sometimes someone is really stuck, and there are lots of ways to get them going.

There’s some trust involved - trust the process, trust your leader.

What are some of the benefits of art therapy? It encourages relief from overwhelming emotions. The sense of having overcome anxiety about doing the art is also itself therapeutic. You’ll discover insights about yourself — sometimes long after you’ve made the piece of art. And, you may forget about your problems for four minutes or forty minutes.

Lynn Murphy

[Shows pieces of art and relates them to Art Therapy]

ART: The Old Tree Struck by Lightning

At my first session, there was just one other person signed up, so I thought I’d get some individual attention. I soon discovered that art therapy was not about doing fine paintings, but about expression. Don asked me to bring to today's session the painting of the old tree struck by lightening because, when I first painted it, I had made an analogy between that, and the way people can be "struck" by a stroke. which often destroys your life as you knew it, and causes a lot of changes. Maybe not all of them bad.

COLLAGE: There is a crack in everything (Leonard Cohen)

The piece expresses my life before the stroke, and after the stroke, and how I’m different before and after - it cracked my life open. The collage is kind of “crazed,” expressing my emotions. It’s made out of pieces of paper that were glued onto a larger piece of paper. There is hardly any brush work - only a little magic marker. The collage format was a change from the markers which I mostly used at that time. Later on I got into acrylic - a paint- and pastel, a kind of crayon.

PAINTING: Kitchen and Easy Chair

Again this is a two part piece which also illustrates the before-and-after of working in the kitchen.

Don: on seeing this painting, my teacher [when he was studying art therapy in BC] suggested that my thesis would be about resilience. My students would come to the classes, in rain or shine, in pain or not in pain.

PAINTING: I Feel Threatened. (house/chair in brown on left, person on right with arrows indicating pain, fire alarm emitting noise)

Two of my pain triggers are cold and sudden loud noises. In my building, there are frequent fire false alarms which trigger me in several different ways. On the left, there’s a table with a cloud full of monsters : I don't remember now what that meant. There are people shooting guns ... relating to violence in the media, which is threatening. I'm afraid that if there really is a fire, I will not be rescued. Also, I am afraid that my post-stroke disability is going to get worse and worse and I will have to go to a nursing home. So the painting is full of expressions of actual fears.

PAINTING : At the Canada Games Pool. Blue - girl in a swimming pool.

I began to feel constricted by painting about pain all the time. I had other things in my life such as Ai Chi - an exercise like tai chi but done in the water. This picture is at the Canada Games Pool, but I also do Ai Chi in my building's pool. In this piece I’m working less in a cartoon style and more thinking about how it looks as a painting.

PAINTING : Dancing to Make the Baby Smile (red/brown girl in blue dress on L, window on R.)

This painting is from a memory in PEI - When my sister was still a baby and she'd start to cry, I’d distract her by doing the highland fling which is quite bouncy and has arm movements and music [sings part of a tune]. So here I’m thinking about my life in the long term - as a child or as a teenager. I have done a lot of memory pieces about growing up in PEI.

PAINTING : At the Greenhouse

This one is about Bill Romkey taking me out to the Farmer Clem’s greenhouse in Bedford, buying herbs for my balcony. The plants you see in this picture are by and large unknown to science. This is also about a new element in life after the stroke.

PAINTING: Rainbow Haven (three people and a walker, a blue sky, and clouds)

Since my stroke, I have missed being able to wade in the salt water due to beaches being inaccessible. Why would this be important? Well, I grew up on an island, used to go to the beach. One day, Jennifer and her sister helped me get out to Rainbow Haven, walker and all, and they took pictures. This painting is based on one of those. I think including the walker in a painting shows increasing acceptance of my new life and its limitations, but also the positive aspects such as becoming a painter.

Eventually the first QEII art group members were moved along so that others could take advantage of Don's sessions. But a few of us decided we wanted to continue doing art together. Space at the hospital became unavailable. After a couple of years we were still seeking a space to do art. We finally decided to meet in the common room in my apartment building. There’s space for about six people, and a sink, but there’s no place to store supplies or works-in-progress, and parking is very limited.

In order for us to do group art we also need a volunteer — someone to wash brushes and lay out drop cloths etc. This is where Jennifer came in as a volunteer.

One of the nice things about painting is that you can create gifts. I am very thankful for the additions to my life that have come out of Don's original therapy project.