Speaking through art
[attach]6688[/attach]Meeting her partner’s cousin in 2008 not only changed Kathleen Downie’s life, but the lives of many others as well.
“She was in her early 60s and had frontal lobe dementia,” Downie says. “You could see that she really wanted to communicate with us, and was struggling.”
As an artist, Downie was all too familiar with the feeling of struggling to communicate as she was facing a creative block at the time.
“I started to think of myself as someone with aphasia, a neurological condition where you can’t speak,” she says. “It was terrible.”
When Downie returned to Canada and began studying for her master’s degree in adult education, she decided to focus on people with Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia.
Last year, as part of her thesis, Downie conducted a 10-week watercolour painting program for seniors with dementia at Senior Peoples’ Resources in North Toronto (SPRINT), a community support organization. It was followed by an exhibit of her students’ work in August.
“I think creativity and well-being go hand-in-hand,” Downie says. “Creating art … taps into emotions, and it’s through emotions that learning is facilitated.”
[attach]6689[/attach]She’s quick to differentiate her program from art therapy, whose practitioners encourage their patients to explore their psychological issues through art. Instead, Downie encourages her students to “speak” through art.
“I would teach them techniques,” she says. “One person might say, ‘I really liked what we did last time. Could we do more of that?’ ”
“Another woman repeatedly created diagonal short lines — it almost looked like raindrops across the page,” Downie says. “She said to me, ‘Kathleen, all of my paintings are the same! I just keep doing the same thing over and over again.’ And I said, ‘That’s what artists do. Eventually you’ll probably do something else.’ ”
Downie’s SPRINT students included Lowell Jenkins, whose wife Julie Foley describes as being in the “late-middle stages” of Alzheimer’s.
“I’m blown away by how much it did for him,” Foley says. “Not only the time he enjoys actually doing the work, but the lasting impact — he will come home and sit and contemplate the work that he did, and talk about it…. It’s really quite remarkable.”
Downie remembers asking Jenkins every week which colours he’d like to use, saying that his choices influenced the subjects he drew.
“He would begin painting shapes of people, or objects, and say, ‘oh, that looks like the mountains in Colorado,’” she says. “And then he would start telling me a story about his life in Colorado.”
[attach]6690[/attach]Downie notes that many people mistakenly identify her students as “patients,” but is happy to correct them.
“They’re people with Alzheimer’s,” she says. “They’re not defined by their Alzheimer’s. They’re only patients in a clinical space.”
Downie has two other upcoming programs: a six-session painting program for people with Alzheimer’s at the Alzheimer’s Society in spring, and a similar class that will be part of Baycrest’s adult day care programs in the summer.
In her day job, Downie’s a grade 5 teacher at Deer Park Public School.
The impending grey tsunami will require society to reconsider the value of its aged, Downie says, including seniors with dementia.
“When people with Alzheimer’s experience greater function and agency they may be included more broadly in society,” she says. “These are individuals who have contributed throughout their lives, within professional and personal spheres. They have lived long and interesting lives.”
