An Artistic Endeavor : Program Helps Alzheimer’s Patients Express Themselves

Omer Rivet spent most of his life designing cars for the Ford Motor Co. Evelyn Testman was an expert gardener. And Grace Gibson lived on a farm in Lancaster with her husband, with whom she later toured much of the world.

All three now reside at Autumn Years Guest Home, a retirement facility for people with Alzheimer’s disease.

In the latter stages of the incurable brain illness--which results in the gradual loss of memory, speech, motor skills and bodily functions--the three spend much of their time shuffling along wide corridors caught in private worlds to which the rest of us are rarely admitted.

If you ask them a question, they generally can’t answer coherently. And what seems to them like normal conversation, to the unafflicted sounds like gibberish.

Yet several times a week the clouds seem to part for an instant, allowing outsiders brief glimpses at who these people were. It happens when Marilyn Oropeza, an Orange County artist, sits them down at a table with paintbrushes in hand. At such times another part of their brains seems to take over, a part that remembers what was.

Rivet, 67, paints intricate labyrinths resembling lavish mechanical designs. Testman, 86, creates delicate floral dashes and dots infinitesimally detailed in pinks, greens and blues. And Gibson, 83, depicts repetitious brown and black patterns that look like wheat fields rolling gently in the sun.

“They can do really fabulous art but you never know when it will come and when it won’t,” says Selly Jenny, who five years ago started Memories in the Making, a countywide art program for Alzheimer’s patients.

The program, which is under the auspices of the Alzheimer’s Assn. of Orange County, was so unusual and successful that it quickly became a model, inspiring imitators throughout the state. And the character of the art was so surprising that it opened up new vistas of research into the debilitating disease believed to afflict 40,000 people in Orange County and about 4 million nationwide.

“Five years ago when this program started,” Jenny said, “it was not known how much went on in the mind of an Alzheimer’s patient. What we have found out is that a great deal goes on, but that you can’t (always) call on it.”

Said Carl Cotman, director of the Alzheimer’s Disease Diagnostic and Treatment Center at UC Irvine and a prominent researcher in the field: “It’s a very exciting program. The quality of art is really excellent; it’s fresh, sparkly and fun to look at. What’s startling is that people who are mute and unable to recognize anyone can produce something like this; it shows that there’s a creative reserve that remains deep into the degenerative process.”

Jenny’s motivations for starting the Alzheimer’s art program were personal. In 1985, her mother died after a long bout with the disease and Jenny, an artist herself, began looking for ways to help other patients express what was going on in their heads.

Her research made her aware of programs in Europe that had successfully revealed some of the inner psychological workings of mental patients through the use of art. Why not try the same thing with Alzheimer’s patients, she thought. At about the same time she met Oropeza and, voila! --a program was born.

Since 1987 about 2,000 Alzheimer’s patients at four Orange County facilities, including Autumn Years, have produced works of art under Oropeza’s tutelage. Unlike traditional art teachers, the young woman says, she never tells her charges what or how to paint--just tries to create a non-judgmental atmosphere in which they feel comfortable enough to be themselves.

“They get an opportunity to have social interaction (through) an activity,” Oropeza explains. “It’s just another form of self-expression.”

The results were an immediate hit. Because of the paintings’ immense popularity, the association--a nonprofit agency that supports itself through donations and fund-raisers--sells them for $200 to $2,000 apiece at a major art show each year.

This past year’s show, Jenny said, was held in November at the Bowers Museum of Cultural Art in Santa Ana. In addition, the association publishes an annual calendar featuring 12 of the most interesting pieces--a project that not only earns money, she says, but increases the public’s understanding and awareness of the disease.

Organizers say the artwork also seems to have a strong therapeutic effect on those who produce it. Among other things, they say, it tends to bolster their self-esteem, calm their nerves and restore some of the confidence that the disease has sapped away.

By far the most lasting legacy of Memories in the Making, however, may be its impact on research that will help scientists better understand not only Alzheimer’s disease, but the nature of the human mind itself.

By looking at their artwork, Jenny says, “you can find out things about patients that they cannot express. Obviously something is happening in the brain that may control the way they see things or the way they make their hands move.”

The evidence, she says, can be seen in the fact that art produced by Alzheimer’s patients tends to share certain characteristics at certain stages of the disease; broken lines, for instance, instead of solid ones, or the use of certain colors in repetitive patterns.

In addition, she said, unlike the work of mental patients, which is often violent or depressing, paintings produced by those suffering from Alzheimer’s disease tend to exhibit an almost childlike cheerfulness and charm.

Cotman, of UCI, believes that by observing such patterns scientists can increase their understanding of just how Alzheimer’s affects the brain.

By isolating and studying the creative faculties that seem to survive the disease, he says, researchers can perhaps learn how to help patients apply those faculties to other, more practical, life skills. And by observing pure creativity stripped, as it is in Alzheimer’s sufferers, of all higher intellectual functioning, he says, researchers can perhaps begin unlocking some of the secrets of intelligence and creativity itself.

“I don’t think anyone realized that artistic abilities would be maintained that long,” he said. “We can’t explain it on a neurobiological level. We need to find out more about it, get into the mastery of skills and really tap into the core of creativity that remains.”

To begin that process, Cotman said, his center will start tracking large numbers of art-producing Alzheimer’s patients early this year.

Yet at the core of the association’s art project is something the families of most Alzheimer’s patients will greet as good news: the fact that, even though they may not be able to communicate it in the usual sense, their loved ones still have buried deep within them what Cotman calls a “real dignity and spirit.”

It emerges in countless ways through Memories in the Making, Jenny says.

It was present in one silent woman who sat for what seemed like endless days painting the same inscrutable scene over and over--the bank of a river with a tree overlooking the water. Oropeza thought she was stuck, that she just wasn’t responding.

Then one day the woman’s husband, sitting behind her to watch, suddenly stood up with tears in his eyes and informed attendants that the scene depicted the spot where the couple had honeymooned years before, something he thought she had long since forgotten.

It was certainly present in the woman who painted a picture of the Texas schoolhouse that she had helped build and taught in for many years.

And it was present during the recent session in which Rivet, Testman and Gibson slowly, painstakingly, and apparently working from some deep part of their consciousness to which only they have the key, gently painted their characteristic markings on large sheets of paper.

“When it comes from the soul. . .” said Jenny, stopping mid-sentence to gather her thoughts. “When they can’t even speak anymore and these wondrous things come out of them, that’s when you really feel like you’re touching them.”