Going Under: Artists on the Healing Power of Artmaking

Researchers are beginning to find that the creative euphoria artists feel as they work can have a salutary effect on the body. Some say there’s a connection between artmaking and the process of healing. According William Poole, in THE ART OF HEALING, “Many cancer patients find it healing to express their fears, hopes and feelings about their illnesses through art.” Poole states, “For years, Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York has encouraged such artistic expression.” Patients said their art work allowed them to forget post-operative pain, to express anger, frustration or fear, and to cope with their situations.

These health-related approaches to art are not available only to the visual artist, and not only to professional or serious artists. Art therapists teach people to make art in a way that helps them express the “stuck” emotions associated with illness. Her work with patients is based on the idea that an emotional release also triggers a physiological release of chemicals in the body that are associated with healing.

What happens when professional visual artists are faced with illness? Does their artmaking help them heal automatically? Are they immune to the effect of artmaking as they make art all the time? Is it just a momentary escape from their illnesses, or does something deeper happen?

Clearly, being an artist does not make them immune to illness. It did not keep Tom Miller and Deryl Mackie from contracting AIDS. I did not halt Ellen Powell Tiborino’s cancer. Tumors invaded Carolyn Mazloomi’s brain. Richard Yarde’s kidney failed. So did Charles Miller’s heart. However, these artists, some consciously and some unconsciously, turned their creative gift toward themselves, and opened their artists’ eyes to their bodies. And each found some power in the connection between their work and healing.

When Richard Yarde began to paint again after what he believes was a spiritual healing in church after many months of illness and weakness, he said that he felt as if he was “laying hands” on himself. And the process was healing. He was on dialysis, but when he was painting he said, “I’d get into a state that I just didn’t experience the dialysis as a difficulty.”

Carolyn Mazloomi was diagnosed with two brain tumors, each 15 years apart. Each time the doctor broke the bad news and told her to go home and prepare to die. She went home and made quilts again. The fear she felt, the worry that might otherwise have inhabited her thoughts, she instead “poured into my work.”

Can one say that to make art is to heal? Perhaps not, but Mazloomi and Yarde were given up for dead. Yet, years later they are still working, exhibiting, traveling, and what is more - telling the story of their personal miracles through their art.

Even those artists that may not make it still reap the rewards of their artmaking. Ellen Powell Tiborino was diagnosed with cervical cancer. After it was radiated, it came back 12 weeks later. Finally, surgery excised it for good, but Tiborino was left in and out of hospitals because of the treatments. But no matter how weak she was, she did her work.
Even in the last moments of her life, she maintained her vow to her art. At one point, she revived from a coma, and came home to die in her own bed with her family and her colors around her.

(Summarized from the INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OR AFRICAN ART, Vol. 16, No. 4, 2000, pp 3-15. © published by the Hampton University Museum