Taking the silence out of suffering

Alex Coolman

Winnie felt nervous the entire time she was painting. She was working on

a grand purple flower--perhaps a peony or an anemone--that floated off a

bright red background, its delicate petals spreading outward like a

firework.

Despite the beauty of what she was creating, Winnie was uncomfortable

with the picture. When she finished, she agonized about it for days and

only gradually came to feel that the painting had value.

Finally, Winnie stopped taking credit for the work altogether. She

decided that the flower had been created by someone named “Werve,” and

that she had only witnessed it in Werve’s studio rather than creating it

herself.

Winnie’s story appears beside her flower in an exhibit at the Crown Cove

Senior Care Community in Corona del Mar.

Although she no longer remembers doing so, Winnie made her flower as part

of the “Memories in the Making” project of the Alzheimer’s Association of

Orange County. The project seeks to put tools for communicating in the

hands of people who are losing the ability to express themselves.

“They want to reach out and make contact,” said Selly Jenny, who started

Memories in the Making in 1988. “That’s what our program is about.”

Winnie’s flower and about a dozen other examples of work by Alzheimer’s

patients are on exhibit through Friday as part of a program to raise

awareness about the disease and stress the importance of communication

for its sufferers.

The exhibit, which has been seen all over the county, is intended

primarily as a tool for public outreach events. But the best works will

also be auctioned in February at a black-tie event at the Four Seasons in

Newport Beach.

Jenny said the public displays of Alzheimer’s patients’ art are a fairly

low priority. She said the most important benefit was what the patients

derive from the creative process.

“We were looking for ways that you can say what you want to say when you

have Alzheimer’s disease,” Jenny said. “We want to dignify the patient,

to improve their quality of life, to validate them.”

Painting is useful for Alzheimer’s sufferers because one of the first

casualties of the disease is linguistic expression. Sam Elsanadi, a

member of the Alzheimer’s Association’s medical and scientific advisory

board, said that aphasia, or the inability to use words, often develops

in the patients, reducing their ability to express feelings and desires.

He said the disease also erodes the short-term memory, creating confusion

and an inability to negotiate the details of day-to-day living.

Jenny said painting allows patients to tap into memories of core

emotional experiences, which tend to remain even in the most severe cases

of the disease. And they are able to communicate those memories without

the struggle of using language.

“What [patients] will remember almost to the end are moments of great

joy, love and pain,” Jenny said. “A first kiss, the birth of a child, the

death of a child. They don’t know who you are or where you are, but they

will tell you in complete detail about something from their youth.”

Some of the products of such recollection, such as Winnie’s flower, are

touched by anxiety. Others, such as two contrasting self-portraits of a

woman named Ruth documenting her decline into depression, are fierce with

the suffering of the disease.

Most others, Jenny said, are far less sophisticated and look like nothing

at all to the outside observer.

“Sometimes all they’re doing is putting a wet hole in the paper,” Jenny

said. “Those wet holes are just as valuable,” because they still serve

the purpose of stimulating recollection.

Then there are works that seem to express great joy. Two ornate fish

painted by a patient named Wayne, a onetime fisherman, are remarkable for

their vitality and intensity. Both are full of vivid greens and blues,

but the later painting, done when Wayne’s Alzheimer’s was beginning to

worsen, doesn’t contain the colors of the fish inside a solid boundary.

Luminous yellows bleed across the page like a drifting cloud lighted by

the sun. The fish dissolves into a pool of color.

The effect, whether by accident or by design, is stunning. FYI

WHAT: “Memories in the Making”

WHERE: Crown Cove Senior Care Community, 3901. E Coast Highway, Corona

del Mar

WHEN: Through Friday. The show is available for viewing from 9 a.m. to 7

p.m.

HOW MUCH:Free

PHONE: (949) 760-2802