Take a look at yet another project based on the understanding of the contribution of art to Alzheimer’s patients.  http://www.capecodonline.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20100318/LIFE/3180301/-1/NEWS

Deprived of language skills, patients observe paintings by artists and respond to them.  The visual image stimulates emotions, memories, stories, responses.  Generally, increased liveliness is observed.

I have worked with patients who find it hard to begin to take pencil to page.  Showing them reproductions – well chosen, of course – often helps them to get going on their own work.  I would recommend an addition to this project in Cape Cod, and anyone else who is working with small groups of dementia patients that observe art.  After the group has looked at a few pictures and discussed them, each could be given a board, with a piece of paper and a pencil.  They could be asked to make a drawing of any one, or any part of the picture before them.  Each will naturally respond to what is significant emotionally for them.  This can be enormously cathartic and communicative at the same time.  Quite significant verbal responses may ensue.

I once showed the members of the art therapy participants some reproductions of mother and child paintings.   Then I asked each one to say something about what it meant to be a mother.  These were people with very diminished language skills.  Yet here are some line from the lovely group-poem that they produced.

The Love of  Child (the name chosen by the group for the poem)

Mother and child – it is the whole world

To be happy, to see the mother hug the child

From joy, tears come to her eyes

Let the child drink from her breast or her body

Maybe they went out to dance from joy

Devotion and unending love

They loved to hear this poem read out again and again and I’m sure it wouldn’t have come about without the presence of the pictures in front of them.

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