Denise Clayton-Leonard had no idea she liked hospitals. Such a thought would never have occurred to her had not her work as a resident artist for the Long Beach Museum of Art led to a one-off assignment doing art with patients at Miller Children’s Hospital to coincide with a gallery opening on-site.
“I came here and started working with the patients, and I was like, ‘Wow!'” she recalls. “They were so grateful. The kids were amazing.”
Inspired by both her experience and the name of the gallery’s inaugural exhibition, “I went out the next week and got me a DBA and said, ‘This is what I’m going to do for the rest of my life: artful healing.”
For the 11 years since then, Clayton-Leonard has run Artful Healing, whose mission is “[to] provide an innovative educational and healing environment for children and families experiencing hospitalization and/or treatment for a variety of illnesses.”
“I knew art was a great avenue to get to a meditative state, a peaceful place,” Clayton-Leonard told me at the opening of Miller Children’s fifth annual exhibition of patient-created art. “When you’re sick, you just want to get lost, you just want to forget about it. […] In hospitals they look for ways to distract the patients, [as well as] to give them the opportunity to have some kind of control. And so I realized that what I wanted and what they wanted was the same thing, and that was an opportunity to facilitate healing. Through mediation you do that. The moment you meditate, your pain subsides.”
Twelve-year-old Bleü Scott (who points out that the umlaut and the U in her name are meant to combine as a smiley face) is a case in point. Scott has been coming to Miller Children’s for treatment for her cystic fibrosis since she was three months old, and she has enjoyed creating art at the hospital for as long as she can remember—an activity she says makes it less of a downer to come to a place where she undergoes less-than-fun treatments like “getting a bronch to clean out the mucous in your lungs.”
Clayton-Leonard is available to provide instruction to the patients, though she sees herself primarily as a facilitator and supporter of the young artists.
“What I provide is an opportunity to do art,” she explains. “I’m not that person who says, ‘Okay, we’re going to do exactly this.’ […] I provide art materials—and silliness. You’ve got to loosen them up. […] We have music and art, and they just go for it. […] You give them the materials, and they do it. […] They get to do whatever they want. They get to do as much as they want.”
An aspect of her experience that has been somewhat surprising—and dismaying— to Clayton-Leonard is finding what a high percentage of the patients with whom she works have no prior experience with art-making.
Bleü Scott next to one of her creations. Photos by Greggory Moore.
“I’m surprised [that] many of them say they have no experience with art,” she says. “Most of them don’t get art in school. Hardly anyone gets art in school anymore unless your family has money and you’re sent to a private school.”
Part of the Artful Healing process is to engage not only the patients in art-making, but also their parents and siblings, so that families can partake in a common activity that will take their minds off of where they are and why. Julissa Solis, 15, and her mother Anna are prime examples. For the last four months Julissa has been receiving treatment for lymphoma, and painting and drawing—activities in which neither she nor her mother had previously engaged—helps her cope.
“It helps time pass faster,” Julissa says. “I’ve actually gotten better, because at first I sucked really bad at it,” she laughs. “Now I can actually paint a little.”
“I want to be there for her so she can feel more comfortable,” says Anna, explaining why at 33 she is for the first time engaging in these acts of creation. “She feels really bad sometimes. But with art it makes your mind more…I don’t know. It’s like therapy.”
Coping with illness may be an art in itself. If so, the work facilitated by Artful Healing is certainly much more than art for art’s sake.
—Top Photo: Denise Clayton-Leonard in front of art she helped facilitate.
For more information about Artful Healing, visit artfulhealingstore.com.