Drawing Messages From the Heart

When Judy Binder was a child, she had imaginary friends, among them Albert Einstein, George Washington and Hawkeye Pierce. They went to school with her, and when they did something funny, she forced containment of her laughter.

Binder also made friends with the soft, elegant faces created by Modigliani and the lonely, downtrodden faces of Picasso’s blue period. At museums, she would stand before landscapes to feel the wind or inhale a meadow’s fragrance.

From her imagination, these people and places made their way into her heart--filling the lonely voids of her life. And that is where she finds them now. Through a program called Heart Art, Binder, 35, is learning about herself, who she is beyond the two terms sometimes used to describe her: high functioning and developmentally disabled.

“I was different, and the kids would see it,” she says of her youth. “Ever since the end of elementary school . . . I didn’t have any friends. It was hard, so I kind of used my imagination a lot to entertain me. . . . I was just bored and lonely, but sometimes you get carried away, and then it’s not good. . . . I had a thin wall between imagination and reality.”

She is one of eight artists in the program, which was started 2 1/2 years ago by Mindy Hahn, a freelance art director, interior designer and set decorator. Once a week, they meet on the small balcony at Hahn’s Westwood apartment.

Many of them, like Binder, have jobs and live independently, but they face unique barriers every day. To be developmentally disabled, Binder says, is to face more challenges than most people. To be an artist is to be given a voice that speaks from within.

“It allows me to go to a really nice place,” she says of the program. “I get free of my thinking mind and get more into my feeling mind.”

The program is not so much about learning technique as it is about learning to express from within, Hahn says. It is a search for freedom from barriers, losing one’s self in an outpouring of the creative process.

For Hahn, it also is about healing. When doctors discovered a tumor in her brain in 1994, she faced her own thin wall. And when she searched for answers and strength, she found resolution in Heart Art.

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Hahn would be awakened by a strange smell but would dismiss it as a nightmare and return to sleep. Then she started fainting and knew it was time to see a doctor. The tumor, found to be benign, was 1 centimeter in size.

It was removed early last year and was followed with precautionary radiation treatment, five times a week for six weeks. During that time, her body and soul drifted in fluid transition.

“It helped me to look at my life in a whole different way,” she says. “It’s unfortunate that life-threatening situations force a person to really turn to some other options, like to sit down for a few minutes to hear what’s going on in your heart. In your mind, there’s all kinds of stuff going on, but what’s going on in your heart?”

It’s the same question that serves as Heart Art’s centerpiece. For the artist, the answer is in the art. Hahn’s reply will take the form of a show, 6-9 p.m. tonight at John O’Groat restaurant, 10516 Pico Blvd. in West Los Angeles.

The work of Heart Art students will be on display and for sale. Proceeds will go toward the purchase of materials. It has become more difficult for Hahn to fund the program out of her own pocket as she struggles to return to the loop that provided her with work prior to surgery.

Like the artists she works with, she sometimes feels forgotten.

“If you don’t make the phone calls, you don’t stay in touch, they forget who you are, and somebody else comes in.”

The weekly art sessions have been as therapeutic for Hahn, 39, as they have been for the artists. “Heart Art kept me going,” she says of her recovery. “The students called me all the time. Their support helped me and gave me a purpose to say, ‘I have to get better, I have work to do.’ ”

She received cards from the students throughout her yearlong recovery. Binder sent her a painting. Unlike the imaginary friends of Binder’s past, Hahn was real. So rather than confiding in a fake president, she sought the help of a real one.

As she was recovering in San Diego, Hahn received a letter from President Clinton, to whom Binder had written expressing how great a void Hahn filled in her life.

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Five artists seated around a table on Hahn’s patio close their eyes and place hands over their hearts as Hahn speaks to them in a meditative voice. “Imagine there is a little white light right in the middle of your forehead,” she says.

Hahn describes the light moving through their bodies. “Let it rest in your heart,” she says, “a sparkling golden ball of white light. Now listen, listen and feel what it is that your heart needs from you today.”

The message from the heart travels back to the middle of the forehead and once again becomes a tiny dot of white light before being cast into the universe. The artists open their eyes.

In this manner, each session begins. Hahn asks them to draw passion. Wayne begins drawing waves, then a sailboat, while Pam draws a bowl, which she will fill with fruit. Karla says she thinks about slot machines when she thinks of passion, but begins drawing beads and hearts instead. Jodi embarks on an abstract journey of brilliant colors, and Binder draws a face.

“It’s a heart connection with the head and the art and the hand releasing the message,” Hahn says. “I want to see depth and emotion. This isn’t art therapy, it’s artistic expression.”

During the years they have been together, they have become friends and confidants. While the focus is on art, at times it has been accompanied by the barriers of being developmentally disabled.

“There has been a general frustration of ‘How will I spend my life, what will I do, how will I make money, how will I support myself, how will I get around?’ ” Hahn says. “Sometimes, there’s been sadness but for the most part, they look forward to coming here to get away from all that. It becomes an oasis and they don’t think about any of that.”

The face that Binder creates has a Modigliani feel. She uses pastels to give the woman a reddish-orange heart that seems to glow. “The heart,” she says, “is filled with the blood of the soul.” It is how she thinks of passion.

It’s hard to tell which side of the wall--separating real from make-believe--to place one’s dreams. “I went to an exhibit at the art museum once, of art created by people who at some point had mental illnesses,” Binder says. “I’d like to see my art at the museum some day with the art of other people who have disabilities. I know that’s only pretend, because it’s not going to happen, but it would mean like being accepted, and it would be exciting.”

And for Hahn the dream is to bring momentum to the program, to find others who believe in it and will support it. She has taken Heart Art to abused children and would like to expand it to others who might benefit from the healing effects of art--to people who are facing their own thin walls.