Saturday morning, and my heels have hardly cooled from my most recent Artist Date for week four from the previous night.  I’m talking with a group of friends, and someone speaks up.  He says, “A lot of you know that I lost a son in an automobile accident two years ago.  I won’t be able to make this event, but some friends of mine are involved in an art exhibit Monday night in Broad Ripple featuring paintings from women who are using art as a way to work through their grief after having lost their children.  The women will be there to speak about their paintings.  I just wanted to let anyone know who might want to attend.  It will be a pretty powerful showing.”

I believe that one of the key values in art is its ability to allow us to feel our feelings, to understand them and work through them, be they positive or negative.  I’ve come to realize that sort of expression as a healthy necessity in my life.  My problems are insignificant when compared to the loss of a child, but I deal with feelings constantly, as we all do, and sometimes I’m pretty terrible at it.  If I wanted to see some people really putting their feelings out there, if I wanted to know just how brave people could be in sharing of themselves, if I wanted to see the proof first hand that art is not just a plaything of children or something on the mantle to be dusted and quietly admired, if I wanted to see how art can heal and how it can help me and others, this would be the place for it.  Ground zero for healing through creativity.  There was no deliberation.  I was going.

I didn’t know anything about the event other than the location and the few details my friend had provided.  I was going into this a bit blind, but sure that I wanted to experience it.  I arrived and began to look at the exhibits.  Before I’d hardly taken in the work itself I was stopped by a quote by Valarie Millard-Combs posted near the closest drawing stating that hardly two years ago her son passed away at a very young age of a heart attack, and his son had passed away just one week following of a heart attack as well.  Another of his sons then passed away in an accident in his garage not one year after that.  Three young men in the space of a year.  I was amazed she was still standing upright, let alone doing art work.

I felt like I didn’t even deserve to be there.  I hadn’t been through an experience like of that sort.  I’d had losses in my life, yes, but none in such close proximity.  What would I do?  How the hell would I handle something like that?  Perhaps I would do what Valarie did, make drawings with walls in them, separating me from those I’d lost, or with my chest opened up for surgery to remove the pain that wouldn’t go away.  There was also one with four sections, one colored nearly completely black.  “That was all black at first, but then I didn’t want it to be that way.  I wanted to show that there was some color in there, somewhere,” she said, “that it wasn’t all blackness.  There might be a lot of black, but something could come through.  I took a scraper and physically scraped the black pastels away in spots so that I could add color.”

Did you ever draw or build something and then attack it physically so that it would show that you were feeling better?  Worse? 

Jaymie Gatewood had a similar story about one of her pieces that was composed of three red figures against a black background.  One of the attendees asked her about it.  What did it mean?  Why was it so red?

“I don’t know exactly who those figures are…partly me, partly Sara and Nathan?  I don’t know, but I remember being very angry when I did that one.  I kept adding red, more red.  I was physically mashing the color into the canvas.  It was a very physical experience on that one.” 

I went over and looked closely at the piece later on.  There were large chunks of oil pastel stuck against the canvas, ground right against it so that they were at least an eighth of an inch thick in places.  If you ran your hand over it you would feel the bumps.  Jaymie lost her son before he even reached school age.  Her daughter Sara died of cancer when she was just 23 years old.  “Very physical experience.”

I spoke with David Labrum, art therapist at St. Vincent’s Hospice about his work.  He said that those involved in the free program come in for two hours per week and create.  They are given materials, space, and time.  He said he does little if nothing to instruct them, and no previous art experience of any kind is necessary.  Each work is an individual piece created during that two hours.  “I never tell them when to to stop, and they seem to be finished at about the end of the two hours.  I just give them the tools and leave the room.  They are allowed to create what they want.”

There were others viewing the work who were in similar circumstances.  One mother attended who had lost a child to SIDS in the last couple of years.  Another family was in attendance that had lost a young child.  I was thinking about my parents, the rest of my family.

I left the gallery feeling rather drained, and fortunate to have my family and friends.  I’d originally planned to go to my parent’s place for dinner that night, but instead I’d been looking at art from mothers who didn’t have children to invite to dinner.

I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and dialed. 
“Hi, dad?  Hey, I was just calling you guys back to say hi.”