Patients Use Painting to Help Find Themselves

CAMARILLO —  Kerry was thought by her doctors to have cerebral palsy, with severe retardation. That’s when she was sent to Camarillo State Hospital.

But in her first months here, Kerry, in her middle age, showed signs that maybe her problems weren’t so easily classified. It seemed that Kerry spoke with conviction and authority in numerous voices, that she had many distinct personalities--up to 100 at one point. Kerry, indeed, was showing signs of being strikingly bright.

Her diagnosis changed. Her treatment changed. That’s when she started painting.

On a wall in the patients art gallery here is one of Kerry’s earlier works: a giant mouth open in the scream position, an image that melds a Mick Jagger poster with mysterious skylines of crooked teeth. It is strangely engaging, if eerie and menacing, and clearly communicates Kerry’s rage and desire to cry out and be heard.

Nearby is a more recent image of Kerry’s: children and smiling figures, among them Mickey Mouse, being carried away in brightly colored hot-air balloons. It is instantly engaging and free of all menace.

Kerry is getting better.

Ditto for Mary, middle-aged daughter of an alcoholic father and schizophrenic mother. When things got unmanageable at home as a child, Mary developed a defense. She would go out to the yard, lay down in the grass, stare at the sky and imagine herself floating upward, beyond the treetops. Mary would, in effect, rise above reality to an imagined “safety.”

Such childhood adaptations, however, hampered her in adult life, which is why she came to this institution. And here, in the debility of mental illness, Mary started painting.

Down the hall from Kerry’s painting is an early painting by Mary, a skyward view, Monet-like in its pastel profusion, but macabre in the characterization of its main subject: a little girl in the sky, lurid red-lipped mouth agape, screaming in holy terror. Mary’s more recent rendering of this scene is but steps away in a larger painting that is dominant in this exhibit: a swirling, skyward view in which a woman’s figure is subtly embedded across the canvas. The figure--supine, lovely, peaceful--appears to be ascending to the heavens, happily.

Mary’s and Kerry’s paintings are a few from among many in the current exhibit at the patients gallery. The gallery’s name is Art Equals Life, and over the entrance is a sign making it clear that the resident artists, unlike golfers, will suffer no handicapping on their competence: A Fine Art Gallery. It is open to the public and among the county’s most original and daring.

Jack Cheney directs the place, teaches the residents here how to sculpt, paint, draw, sing--do whatever they need to do to give sound or sight to the cries within. Cheney has another way of putting it: “I’m an art therapist. Our goal here is simple. We want these people to find inner images and symbols and mine meaning from them. These images form the signature of their emotional being. The act is not just aesthetic but therapeutic.”

Cheney is a longtime artist in these parts. The fancy carved doors on the Ojai Arts Center are by him. He’s a practicing musician, as well. To talk to him is to understand that Cheney could care less about medium than expression.

“We sing. We play. We do what it takes to break down the performance anxiety and resistance to expression that we learned when we were, oh, in the second grade.”

With pride, Cheney leads a visitor to a painting near Kerry’s scream. It is a wash of deeply saturated color fields, each rounded and warm and inviting. The work is bold, modern; it has what Los Angeles gallery owners like to call “edge.” It is by a woman named Sue.

Sue lived in Unit 42 here until her discharge a month ago. Sue had what clinicians call Impulse Control Deficits. Sue was just not in control.

She showed up at Art Equals Life and did what Cheney calls the same painting we all did in second grade: flowers on the ground below, blue sky up top “and a great big blank in the middle.” In time, Sue started cracking her own code, finding those inner images that helped define Sue to Sue. In August, a painting of Sue’s won first place in the amateur division of the art competition of the Ventura County Fair.

The gallery threw a party, and Sue has been gleeful ever since. So, too, are Kerry and Mary, who on this visit are in a side room painting, eagerly exchanging notions of what the Siennese achieved by first coating the canvas in white before laying on the pigment.

As they paint, however, two figures in the gallery seem more prominent than ever: life-size relief sculptures of unnamed patients who laid down to be coated with plaster-soaked cloth bandages.

The white casts are mounted high up above the paintings and appear, wrappings and all, to be crashing right through the walls. They are at once ghostly and angelic, lending the arched gallery space an ancient and modern dimension: a sense of despair and hope, damnation and redemption, darkness and light.

“That’s where we hover,” Cheney said, “in that shadowy place.”

If anything, that shadowy place has become a real adjunct to treatment here and vivid demonstration that the line differentiating the well from the unwell can be as fine as a pencil stroke.