Fashioning Memories Into Memorable Works of Art

An inch at a time, Lloyd’s brain betrayed him.

Alzheimer’s disease slowly stole his powers of reasoning. Normally, if there is a cognitive thought passing from the lips of the 85-year-old former speech professor, his therapists are hard-pressed to recognize it.

But still inside his mind, there is a world of explosive color and vivid memories.

Paint brush in hand, Lloyd proved it recently at his Memories in the Making art class at a Costa Mesa adult day care center. Filling a blank sheet with an electric blue ocean scene from his former home in Hawaii, Lloyd turned to a therapist and for the first time in months, spoke clearly.

“He started to talk about Hawaii and the waves and ocean and how much he loved it there,” said Cordula Dick-Muehlke, director of the Harbor Area Adult and Health Center. “There is a real person inside there and we found him. It was heartwarming.”

Memories in the Making is an art therapy program sponsored by the Alzheimer’s Assn. that originated in Orange County and is starting to sweep across the country.

The nonprofit organization has put together an exhibition of paintings by local Alzheimer’s patients that will tour the county for about a month, then be sold at an auction on March 13 at the Newport Harbor Art Museum.

Sometimes painted in child-like strokes, other times done with near-professional flair, the artwork is steeped with personal meaning--whether it be an abstract window to a soul tortured by confusion or a peaceful mental snapshot from a vacation trip.

For people walled off by the disease, often unable to speak or recognize relatives, this is a precious line of communication.

“Alzheimer’s is a disease of losses that keeps going until you lose everything,” said Selly Jenny, an Alzheimer’s Assn. board member and creator of Memories in the Making, whose mother suffered from Alzheimer’s for 20 years before dying in 1986.

“Their paintings show us that they just want to remember who they’ve been, what they’ve been,” she said. “This whole program was developed to dignify patients and give them things they need to bring back their quality of life.”

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The process is simple and inexpensive. A $3.98 tin of paints with tiny, multicolored squares in a row--brush included--and a large sheet of plain white paper are the basic tools of art therapy.

In the Costa Mesa facility, as in seven other retirement and nursing homes in Orange County, therapists walk around tables that are filled with elderly patients, gently probing them with questions about their artwork to stimulate memory.

At age 69, Dick thought he’d shake up his life and move from Iowa to Southern California. Afflicted with the beginning stages of Alzheimer’s, he took a wrong turn en route and ended up lost and confused in a small Northern California town.

A year later, the large man with a full head of white hair leaned over a table at the adult care center, dabbing into his paint box and applying colors in long brush strokes. The result: a large oval filled with broad stripes of warm greens, golds and browns.

“This is Iowa,” Dick said with a smile. “I came from here.”

Little is known about the medical effect of art therapy on Alzheimer’s patients because general research into the disease is woefully underfunded, say health-care professionals who care for the elderly.

“I’m not sure we have all the answers, but there is something happening here” with art therapy, said Carl Cotman, director of the Institute for Brain Aging and Dementia at UC Irvine. “What I think is happening is that it goes down and pulls out some kind of creative reserve.

“There’s a definite release and communication taking place in the brain, even when language skills are not present,” he said. “It’s an example of plasticity--how the brain system can move and adapt.”

With Alzheimer’s, the easiest access is to long-term memory. A patient might not remember where they live now, but can talk profusely about old friends, relatives and places. These familiar images often become subjects for their paintings.

Teresa Purvis, who runs the Costa Mesa program, has a client named Katrina who paints the exact same scene, over and over.

“She paints a view looking out of a window of her garden in Germany,” said Purvis. “She uses different colors and paints it in different seasons, but it’s the same picture each time.

“That was her life and she cherishes those memories,” said Purvis. “Even if painting makes her feel good for a just little while, it’s worth it.”

By organizing the traveling art exhibit, Jenny is trying to show that Alzheimer’s sufferers are not slack-faced zombies. Even relatives are sometimes surprised at the feeling and coherence expressed in the paintings, she said.

“People come to the art shows and are deeply moved by it,” said Jenny. “It’s a chance to see the wonderful things that Alzheimer’s patients are capable of rather than just hearing depressing things about their lives.”

Just gathering to paint is a warm social experience for many patients. They converse, usually sharing reminisces of the past. Sometimes patients will even take over their friend’s painting, finishing it or adding something new.

Cory, an 86-year-old former physical education teacher with warm blue eyes and a firm handshake, spent about 20 minutes hunched over her painting, then another half-hour shyly covering it with her arms.

Finally, she agreed to turn the painting over, revealing a portrait of a smiling, brown-haired woman.

“That’s my sister,” said Cory, whose sibling died a decade ago. “Isn’t she beautiful?”