Art Affords Insight Into Alzheimer’s

Gertrude Frazier had never picked up a paintbrush before this year. Now, at 85, her watercolor “Through These Fields to School” will tour the county as part of “Memories in the Making,” a show of artworks by patients with Alzheimer’s disease.

“We think it’s fantastic,” said Phyllis Garrett, Frazier’s daughter. “This has just thrilled her to death. She still understands that something special is happening.”

The second annual “Memories” show, which opened at the Guggenheim Gallery of Chapman College last week, features works by 26 Alzheimer’s patients from three Orange County adult care centers.

Beginning later this month and continuing through Dec. 11, the 33 paintings and pastel and pencil drawings will tour 16 Home Savings of America branches throughout the county. The show was curated by the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County.

Alzheimer’s, an incurable, degenerative disease that attacks the brain, afflicts about 40,000 people in Orange County and 4 million nationwide.

Selly Jenny, the show’s organizer, said painting gives the patients a hard-won sense of accomplishment.

“For years and years, they may have been struggling with inner humiliation and embarrassment because they carry this consciousness that they are losing it,” Jenny said. “But the art world is a totally non-threatening world. You can’t make a mistake when you’re doing a picture.”

The show is also a public information tool, Jenny said, and provides a rare positive profile of Alzheimer’s patients.

The artworks, figurative and impressionistic, childlike and sophisticated, were created without assistance, Jenny said.

Dr. Carl Cotman, director of the UCI Brain Aging and Alzheimer’s Center, believes that the works have the “signature” of Alzheimer’s disease.

“If you ask a person with a migraine headache to do a painting, it looks like a migraine headache,” Cotman explained. “Alzheimer’s paintings are humanistic, colorful and refreshing. They’re telling you that’s what’s in there . . . a certain youthful vigor and enthusiasm.”

The art may offer a key to understanding a patient’s capacity for memory and comprehension, he said.

“To be able to say what’s there and what’s not will tell us a lot about what people are, really,” Cotman said.

The art may also provide a “conceptual breakthrough” in the way the public and medical experts look at Alzheimer’s patients in the future, he said, adding that he plans to study the condition of several artists in the show.

“You’ve got a glimmer that something is doable, positive and uplifting,” Cotman said, “and that’s what we need to work with.”

For more information on Alzheimer’s disease, contact the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County at (714) 631-0245.