Drawing Out Kids’ Feelings Is an Art

The rain was coming down pretty good Monday afternoon. It was the kind of dreary day that, frankly, could leave you feeling a little sad. Inside a nondescript building off the beaten path in Laguna Niguel, eight children sit around a table to paint and imagine happy things and -- from time to time, if they feel like it -- to talk about feeling sad.

And, often, to laugh and say funny little-kid things.

A part of each one of them is sad because all have lost a father in the recent past. One of them, an 11-year-old girl, lost both parents within a two-year period. The children are enrolled in a free, four-session program set up by Art & Creativity for Healing, a nonprofit organization founded by former fine-arts professor Laurie Zagon. The idea is that art is liberating, that it can touch nerves and express things that sometimes our words can’t.

And when it comes to children dealing with deaths of parents, expression becomes therapy.

“First of all, kids love art,” says Zagon. “I started with stressed-out Wall Street executives and then to AIDS patients at Children’s Hospital. I realized that when people put down feelings with colors, they have a tendency to talk more about what the feeling is like. That’s the premise, teaching the language of colors and painting as a method of communicating their feelings.”

Six-year-old Kelsey, clenching her mother’s sleeve, is the first to arrive. The staff asks Kelsey for a smile, but she’s not ready. As her mother leaves, Kelsey, an only child, hugs her tightly. Later, 6-year-old Amanda arrives. She’s wearing an oversized T-shirt to keep paint from landing on her clothes. The T-shirt was her father’s, who died two years ago.

Inside the art room, the children discuss last week’s assignment: daily drawings or words in a journal. Rosemary, a cheery red-haired girl of 7, drew palm trees: “My dad used to draw palm trees by the ocean,” she says. Reviewing her work, she adds, “I couldn’t draw them like he could.”

Trevor, 11, wrote about making the honor band with his clarinet. Allison, also 11, wrote that she had done well in algebra. “He was a big math and science freak,” she says. “He’d be proud of me.” On another page was an entry she wouldn’t show anyone, not even her mother.

Sandy Platamone-Shima is Kelsey’s mother. “She’s just starting to verbalize things [about her father’s death],” she says. “It’s been two years since her dad passed away. She loves to do art, and this is just a way to get feelings out that she probably wouldn’t be able to talk to mom or a counselor about.”

At the start, Kelsey wasn’t keen on the program. “She said, ‘I don’t want to go because I don’t want to talk about heaven,’ ” her mother says. After the first session, Kelsey made a point of asking if she could go back again.

This week, Kelsey leafs through her journal and stops at a page. “My dad used to bring me presents when he got home from work,” she says. After pausing, she says, “I don’t know what to say about that picture.”

Helping her leaf through the book, Zagon asks, “What message are you trying to say to Dad?”

Kelsey isn’t sure but stops at a page with dolls she’d drawn. She especially likes dolls, she says. She shows a drawing of her mother, pregnant and about to give birth to her, with her father also in the room.

Later, Kelsey talks about her father’s illness. “When he got sick, he got pale in the face. They brought a hospital bed home, and friends were there and he got up and let me get in the bed.” That happened a long time ago, when she was younger, Kelsey says.

“How was it, drawing in the book?” Zagon asks her.

“It was good,” Kelsey says.

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Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. He can be reached at (714) 966-7821, at dana.parsons@latimes.com or at The Times’ Orange County edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626.