Painting the Past : Alzheimer’s Patients Find a Way to Express Their Memories

Edith Wakefield, 85, sat silently in the sunlit room off the back-yard patio, her hands folded on her lap, her porcelain-thin body held erect, the perfect picture of untroubled genteelness.

But the image was deceiving.

Alzheimer’s disease has devastated her mind, leaving her in endless confusion, her thinking processes shattered, her life reduced to being fed, clothed and bathed by others.

Asked simple questions by staff members of the Autumn Years board-and-care residence in Anaheim, she can only smile mechanically, producing no sounds, showing no comprehension in her eyes.

But earlier this year, she was given a paintbrush and watercolors. She started with tiny paintings of a few leaves or flowers, then moved on to larger depictions of hills and fields--all the time bringing back to life some of her most distant memories.

Her warmest, most indestructible memory yet: a softly colored, full-blooming tree with red lines coursing through the center like a heartbeat. The title given her work, “My Flowering Tree.”

“She’s reliving some of her earliest and deepest memories when she was growing up on the farm in Nebraska,” said her daughter, Donna, of Garden Grove. “I think she’s found a way to communicate in the only way she can--without struggle.”

The Wakefield watercolor is one of 32 works by 26 local patients in a most unusual exhibition put together by the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County.

Organizers consider this Orange County exhibition, called “Memories in the Making ‘89,” to be the first of its kind in the nation--a show devoted entirely to artworks by victims of Alzheimer’s and related brain-impairing disorders.

The show, which will be touring 10 Home Savings of America branches until Dec. 1, represents patients from the Garden Grove Community Adult Day Care Center and Saddleback Valley YMCA Adult Day Center, as well the Autumn Years home.

To backers, the show underscores the prevalence of Alzheimer’s, an irreversible, degenerative disease that damages the brain and results in vastly impaired memory, thinking and behavior. Nationwide, about 4 million persons are afflicted with Alzheimer’s, including 24,000 in Orange County.

And organizers hope such an exhibition will help counter the stigmas about Alzheimer’s victims. Despite the wave of media and other reports in the past several years on the once obscure disease, misconceptions remain, association members said.

“There was some skepticism about this show, people who felt, ‘What’s the use? These victims are empty shells; there’s no one there,”’ said Selly Jenny, the Orange County association board member who organized the show.

Dr. Robert Pfeffer, UC Irvine associate professor of neurology, said the attitude that “everything is lost is a great oversimplification.” The exhibition “tells us in a startlingly beautiful, expressive way that certain functions are spared (in Alzheimer’s victims), including some creative ones,” he said.

While a few works depict the victims’ anger and frustrations over their mental deterioration, most of the “Memories in the Making” works are in a sunnier vein, from whimsical treatments of landscapes, dwellings and animals to more abstract, almost impressionistic shapes.

“Although most of the (exhibit) people are untutored, they are clearly in touch with their artistic impulses,” said Chapman College art professor Richard Turner, director of Chapman’s Guggenheim Gallery (where the exhibition was first held, Oct. 16 to 18). “Some reveal a sense of focus that is all the more remarkable considering the chaos brought about by their disease.”

Beyond the artistic and scientific implications, the most immediate--and most gratifying--impact is on the families. To them, such an art program is an unexpected gift.

“Seeing (her art) is comforting, even though it’s only a fragment, just a glimpse of her inner self,” explained Floyd Friesen of Fullerton, whose 84-year mother, Mina, is part of the Alzheimer’s Assn. exhibition. “But it helps us realize that my mother is still very much with us, that we haven’t yet lost her.

Two photographs of Mina Friesen--one taken 35 years ago, the other just last Easter--are atop the living-room piano in her son’s Fullerton home. It is a fitting and touching familial gesture.

“She loved to have us all gathered around the piano while she played the old songs and hymns, especially on the holidays,” recalled Floyd, a retired Navy captain and one of five Friesen children raised on farms in Illinois and Nebraska during the Depression ‘30s. “And she adored children--any children!”

But Mina, stricken by Alzheimer’s, hasn’t played the piano at home or in church for years. And three years ago, when her erratic behavior, her wanderings from the Fullerton house and the 24-hour care she needed became too overwhelming, she was placed in the Autumn Years facility in Anaheim.

At first, like some of the other residents there, she didn’t seem very interested in the weekly art sessions. But the art therapist, Marilyn Oropeza, kept encouraging her, placing the brush in her hand, tracing an outline of a house or animal for Mina to fill in with colors.

Slowly, Mina joined the others in the mural-coloring ventures, such as painting folksy winter scenes to hang on the walls for Christmas, Thanksgiving and Easter.

Then one day, ignoring a suggestion that she try painting a flower by herself, she struck out on her own, painting a bold, swirling abstract work of varying shapes amid hues of orange, pink, green and purple.

To Floyd Friesen, the painting, later titled “Color Soft Egg” for the exhibition, evoked the early years on the farm, some shapes suggesting holiday festivities, another even a womb.

His mother’s design, he said during a recent visit to the board-and-care residence, “is very much of family and home--everything that is dearest to my mother.”

Another painting in the show, “Self Portrait” by Joel, is not so gentle, not so nostalgic.

Joel, 85, who attends the Saddleback Valley YMCA Adult Day Care Center in Mission Viejo, painted the harshly distorted, almost grotesque portrait of a man’s face shortly after he joined the center last January.

To center director Marcia Norian, “Self Portrait” is a striking example of a victim’s anger over the growing helplessness brought on by Alzheimer’s--”his image of a victim from deep within,” she said, “looking at how the disease has imprisoned them.”

His works since have seemed calmer. He has helped other day-care center members on mural-type paintings, including some having to do with one of his great loves, the sea and boating.

And Joel, a former librarian with Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry, is still capable of engaging in jaunty chatter, even though he doesn’t stay long on any one subject and needs constant prompting about details from his wife.

His latest artwork, a cheerful collage of multicolored paper shapes, has a place of honor in the couple’s Laguna Hills home. It is proudly displayed under glass atop their large living-room coffee table.

Sitting at home one evening, Joel seemed to remember little of his artworks, only to say, “For an old guy, it’s fun, it’s creating something.”

But Joel’s wife added: “If the (art program) can help my husband and others maintain their sense of esteem, their dignity and pride--even just awhile longer--then it has more than proven its worth.”

The terrible relentlessness, the irreversible nature of Alzheimer’s is not avoided in the “Memories in the Making” show.

It is depicted with graphic bleakness in a seven-picture sequence by Peter Idsinga--all of the same subject, a windmill in his native Netherlands, but painted over a period of eight years.

The works of the retired dairyman, who had some art training, are part of a study by Dr. Jeffrey Cummings, director of UCLA’s Dementia Research Program, in one of the few such art-related projects in the country.

The first windmill, drawn by Idsinga before he showed symptoms of having Alzheimer’s, is confidently composed, richly shaded and precisely detailed.

The pictures that follow reveal Idsinga’s descent: the aimless composition, the haphazard detailing. By the final image in 1987, the windmill is shorn of vanes, the main structure nothing but wavering scrawl-like lines.

Idsinga’s works “trace the insidiousness of the disease, the unmistakable erosion of his mind and control,” said Cummings. “You can see with your own eyes the disintegration of that part of his being.”

Idsinga, 78, no longer lives at home with his wife, Bernice, in Whittier. He now lives in a board-and-care facility in West Covina.

“He doesn’t seem to remember anything. He doesn’t speak anymore, not even my name. Sometimes I think he recognizes me,” said his wife.

But another part of him--his art--has vanished for good. “He can’t draw anymore,” Bernice added. “He hasn’t in two years.”

The works of Kathy, another resident at Autumn Years, aren’t in the current exhibition. But to show organizers her story may be closer to the heart of the art project.

As art therapist Oropeza related the incident:

“For weeks, Kathy, who almost never says a word, would sit and draw the same sketchy scene over and over--a little house there, a few trees here, some kind of brook there. She never varied it; she never tired of it.

“Her husband visited every day but not during the art session, until this one Thursday morning. He sat close to Kathy, watching as she started her usual painting. Suddenly he began to cry. He knew immediately what the scene was.”

It was where they had taken their honeymoon.