By Jodie Sinnema
Every Monday morning, Don MacDonald takes out his oil paints, brushes and canvas and works on his cocky French rooster, touching up the warm reds in the feathers or the lush greens of the bushes behind.
This painting is quite different from his usual: a lighthouse on the coast or a ship with sails billowing.
“They don’t confine their poultry there, in Holland or Belgium. They run all over the roads and lawns, anyplace,” explains MacDonald.
At 69, MacDonald isn’t quite the strutting rooster he used to be. He sits in his electric wheelchair, his hands gesturing with his words, his legs lying still.
“I think it’s good therapy,” he says about his painting class at Saint-Vincent Hospital. “It keeps your mind off some things.” Like the fact he no longer lives at home with his wife. She had difficulty caring for MacDonald, a paraplegic since 1981 after a car crash on Highway 401.
Art as therapy isn’t new, but it has had a slow acceptance in much of Canada.
Sharon Mintz, a private art therapist working out of Centretown, says there are only six certified art therapists in the Ottawa-Hull region, none of whom have enough work to live on. Right now, she has only eight clients.
“Some of the older psychiatrists have a more straightforward attitude and think art therapy is frivolous or foolish,” says Mintz, whose office is at Bank and Cooper Street. “I feel a lot of this has to do with money.”
Hour-long sessions with Mintz cost between $20 and $50. OHIP doesn’t cover any art therapy costs.
“I think it’s better than just verbal therapy,” she says. “Talking is a much harsher way of getting to the problem. Art therapy reaches our subconscious. We don’t watch ourselves the way we do when we talk. There aren’t as many defence mechanisms in art.”
Art programs like the one at Saint-Vincent aren’t exactly art therapy, says Mintz, but she applauds any effort that encourages people to be creative.
For MacDonald and others at the chronic-care hospital, art is a way to express themselves.
Hildegarde Lalande, who leads the art classes, says one artist has been debilitated by a stroke — her speech is slurred, her words mixed up. But when she sits down at an easel, snow-tipped trees and houses appear.
Another woman has multiple sclerosis, says Lalande, but when her hand is anchored, her shaking stills enough for her to create vivid abstract paintings.
Mintz’s practice is more about the process than the product.
“It’s very personal. It’s very vulnerable. It’s not an art class.”
Pictures drawn on paper and Plasticine figures stay in her office and aren’t shown to anyone but the client.
The adage “pictures speak louder than words” is true, says Mintz. She sees emotions in art: people drawn without feet can’t run away; those drawn without ears might be tired of listening or feel they aren’t being heard; smiles with huge teeth suggest aggression.
She has seen pictures, drawn by young children, crowded with decapitated figures and people being hanged.
She facilitated one adult session in which she instructed the group to draw a perfect world on one big sheet. Off in one corner of the page, a sketched figure was jumping off a cliff.
“I’m trying to give children control over their lives,” says Mintz. She works with her husband, a child psychiatrist, who counsels the parents while Mintz allows the children to unleash their thoughts on paper.
Sometimes, rather than just talk about the images, she will ask her young clients to change the figures in the picture, giving themselves crayon muscles or making the bullies smaller.
Mintz has volunteered at schools, worked with companies such as Mitel and has run sessions at community centres.
Carol-Ann Cheff, a relatively new art therapist in Ottawa, has sought work at an addictions treatment centre and at Tapestry House, a respite for care-givers.
“It’s a field that has a lot of potential for growth,” says Cheff.