View the exhibition at the Fort Worth Community Arts Center, 1300 Gendy Street in the Cultural District, Monday through Saturday, 9 am to 5 pm, through January 30, 2015,
Memories in the Making®, the Alzheimer’s Association art program for people with dementia, is a method of inspiring and helping people with dementia to paint with watercolors. Facilitators trained by the Alzheimer’s Association don’t try to teach painting techniques but rather encourage the artists to make the kinds of marks that come naturally to them. “If it is paint on paper, it is a painting,” is the program’s mantra.
Most of the artists in Songs from the Shadows never painted before joining the art activity in their assisted living community or nursing home. They were probably too busy with professions, families, hobbies and countless other pursuits to give much thought to sitting down and trying to paint a picture. Today, putting a paint-loaded brush on the paper in front of them is one of the few avenues for creative self-expression remaining to them.
Charming pictures and lyrical abstractions, accompanied by the painters’ own words and stories, give a new voice to those who are losing the ability to speak, think and do. The paintings offer a poetic look at the thoughts and feelings of people who are well-advanced in the disease process; they tell us, as nothing else can, about faded memories, random thoughts and sparks of joy as vital and unique as the people who created them. Like songs emanating from the shadows of long lives now obscured by the loss of speech and memory, each painting has its own tempo, timbre and lyrics, a heartfelt expression of the person within.