The healing properties of art

Featured on shreveporttimes.com

You want your skin to be purple? Make it so. That is the power of art. It’s empowering. Even when shreveporttimes.comsick.

When I first walked through Shreveport’s Feist-Weiller Cancer Center, part of University Health, I was bowled over by the colorful art on the walls. It’s like the place is using paint as its most potent weapon against cancer. That, of course, may not be true, but you and I both know how potent creativity can be.

Feist-Weiller is all about research, treatment, and education in the fight against this deadly and cruel disease. The good folks there do know about the fight on their hands and they will use — they do use — every weapon they can get their hands on to win it.

Take for instance the section of the place that admits children. No, children are not immune to cancer, and, yes, children come through the place regularly for treatment. The Center has a special relationship — an official affiliation — with St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital in Memphis.

When a child patient first enters the door of the FWCC, there is an element of fear. One of the first things a staff member does is take a photo of the child. Later, a sketch from the photo is created and handed to the child, along with a full set of paints. The child is encouraged to take the colorless sketch and make it as bright and beautiful as the colors will allow. There are no rules. Pick a color. Any color.

Don’t feel like painting your skin pink or brown? Go ahead! Paint yourself purple! Or blue, or bright yellow. If it makes you smile. If it makes you feel better.

Art can banish the fear.

Jane Glass began the Arts in Medicine Program at the Center 10 years ago. Today, Darlene Whitaker runs it.

With barely concealed enthusiasm, Whitaker talks about seeing an immediate change in attitude when the children are given the tools of art.

“They come in nervous, and pretty soon they take to giggling,” Whitaker said.

But the children’s portraits are not the only art going on in the building and in the program. It is not just children slinging paint.

Glass began the program by taking a famous painting by one of the world’s masters, breaking the painting down into grids, sketching the basic grid image on an 8x10 sheet of art paper and giving patients the sketch, a paintbrush and paint. It is kind of a paint-by-numbers. Then the completed grids are assembled and the finished piece is framed and hung anywhere there is empty wall space.

Whitaker said that the finished masterworks are from four grids to 20. With 20 8x10 grids — or tiles — that can make for a rather large piece of art. But the whole point is to add color to what could have been a rather institutional place.

“If there is a dark part in the original painting, we change it to something more colorful,” Whitaker said.

So when 20 different patients work on a piece of art with each one completing a grid piece, the finished painting is given a completely different, and much more colorful and celebratory feel. And it has a distinct feel that many people took part in the creation.

This technique of creating art for the FWCC walls has so many facets! Each finished piece is dripping with the personality of the team who created it.

There is a lot of sitting around there waiting for and taking cancer therapy drugs. Because any number of patients must go there for regular checkups or scheduled treatments, they actually have something to look forward to when they take their seat, something to fight boredom. The FWCC is definitely not a place for year-old magazines in a waiting room.

The original piece of art is transformed into a piece of art that almost glows with pride of the artists. It has become not an iconic work of art from ages ago that inspired awe and worship, but has been transformed into something completely different, but still quite recognizable. The piece is now filled with things like humor and teamwork and fun.

The patients who worked on the piece now have a small understanding of the masterwork, as do other patients who walk down the halls daily. It is participatory art. It shows off the diversity of the traditions of art. There is Picasso. Over there is Matisse. And over there is Clementine Hunter.

Ten years of large works of art have taken to filling up a lot of hallway walls. One way that Whitaker has helped to push the project in another direction is that local landmarks have been given the grid treatment. The Strand Theater never saw so much color on it exterior.

Whitaker is adamant that what they are doing is not “art therapy.”

That is a discipline that takes training. An art therapist is a professional. The Arts in Medicine Program may not be art therapy, but if it brings joy to hearts in a difficult place, if it helps to banish fear in children, if it brings smiles to the medical teams that work all the time with technical issues, if it can help in the battle in its sometimes small and sometimes large way, if it brings giggles to a place that does not have a reputation for giggles, who cares what you call it.

As long as it helps in the battle for healing there on Kings Highway.