The art of healing
Posted on Sunday, June 3, 2007
URL: http://www.nwanews.com/nwat/Living/53712/
Jo Ann Kaminsky sits in a rocking chair in what would be considered the living room of this house, talking about the power of her profession against a canvas that is far from blank. Among a kaleidoscope of inviting colors, Kaminsky cradles Lewis, a butterscotch-colored tabby cat with an equally sweet disposition, while explaining that although her business, The Art Experience, could pass for a cozy bungalow, it is not her place of residence. “ Lots of kids say ‘ Do you live here ? ’ because it looks like a house, ” Kaminsky said. “ This is my workspace. ” It is, though, the home of Lewis — and the numerous pieces of artwork that fill up her studio like a giant snow globe nestled off Sixth Street and Hill Avenue in Fayetteville. Although Kaminsky wears many colorful hats, her biggest is that of an art therapist. When Kaminsky first opened up shop at the building in 1991, she primarily taught traditional art classes in addition to running a private practice as a counselor. Shortly thereafter, though, Kaminsky was inspired to earn her master’s degree in art therapy at the Art Therapy Institute in Dallas, allowing her to weld her passions into a single pursuit. Although she still teaches pottery classes in the building’s basement studio, most of her energy is spent serving as a harbinger of a tranquility usually alien in her clients’ lives. Art therapy is a burgeoning profession that has experienced a surge in popularity in the past decade, and Kaminsky is one of five art therapists practicing in the state.
Reaching a safe place
Kaminsky and fellow area art therapists such as longtime colleague and friend Budhi Kling, who has been practicing art therapy in Northwest Arkansas for 20 years, work with people suffering from an array of mental illnesses such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia as well as those dealing with the loss of a loved one or divorce. However, their man focus for several years now has been working with domestic abuse victims and their children. Once a week, Kaminsky and Kling, who have been friends for at least 20 years, take a trip north to the Benton County Women’s Shelter to work with women and children whose sense of family has been torn apart. Although they may only stay at the shelter for about two weeks, they take part in a 24-week art therapy session run by Kaminsky, who oversees the children’s class, and Kling, who moderates the women’s class.
Kling, who has co-written a manual on how to teach such classes with Kaminsky, said the first classes for both sessions focus on three main points: identifying feelings, creating a support system and creating a sense of safety. Feeling safe is the most crucial element, Kling said, and it can often take several weeks to create that safe mental place before a client moves on to other issues such as anger and powerlessness.
“ That always is one of the first things we talk about is how to create a safe place because if you don’t have a sense of safety in therapy, you can’t do any healing, ” Kaminsky said.
Several art therapists agree that the process of creating the artwork is just as important as the finished product, perhaps more so.
“ I think that the process of making a piece of artwork gets me in touch with a part of myself that I don’t normally access in everyday life, ” Kling said.
After receiving an assignment to paint her life as a river, a common metaphor used in art therapy, one woman at the shelter produced a drawing rife with dark colors and jagged mountains against an ominous black sky. Her river was a black serpentine shape highlighted with fragments of dark red.
“ My river is all black, ” the woman told Kling. “ The red is blood. I have had a violent life. ”
Lori Joslin, the shelter’s executive director, said the program started in 2001 with the help of a grant from the Springdale-based Community Care Foundation. After receiving a continuous stream of positive feedback about the program, the shelter now completely funds the art therapy sessions on its own.
“ Time and time again, whether they are young or adults, they have expressed how beneficial the program has been to them, and I think instrumental to that is the therapists, ” Joslin said. “ They create such a comfortable atmosphere that they’re really able to get down to business and tackle these issues. … By the end of the their 24 weeks of art therapy, I fully, wholeheartedly believe that their self-confidence has increased and their self-esteem has increased, and they have a full understanding of family dynamics. ”
Five years ago, the women and children who participated in one of the shelter’s sessions each fashioned a clay tablet. The tablets were combined to form a tile mural to provide hope to the shelter’s future residents. The threads of the tapestry are as different as the DNA of the women and children themselves. A sense of optimism shines with the help of bright colors, outlines of houses topped with chimneys and triangular roofs and inspirational phrases etched into the clay: “ Happy evenings are here ” “ Safe place for everyone ” “ Making me safe for me and my kids ” “ Every rose has its thorn ” “ I’m a woman with a heart just like you. ” “ I love dad ” “ It gets better. ”
Confronting the past
Although art >therapists certified by the Art Therapy Credentials Board undergo intensive training, they never go so far as to diagnosis their patients. Instead, they facilitate the means for the client to come to their own realizations. “ I don’t interpret. That’s a very important thing, ” Kaminsky said. “ I will help them interpret because they know more about what those images mean. ” “ A lot of times people assume that we will analyze their art, ” said Lauren Levine, who operates a private practice as an expressive art therapist in addition to working parttime at Ozark Guidance’s Bentonville office. “ What I always tell my clients is that it would be arrogant of me to tell them what the images mean. That would be me telling more about myself than my client. ” It is this potential of discovery that has made art therapy a popular mechanism to tackle post-traumatic stress disorder and other mental illnesses.
In the mid ’ 90 s, Kling worked with people who suffered from post-traumatic stress at the Fayetteville Veterans Administration Medical Center. She recalled one Vietnam War veteran with reoccurring bad dreams. When Kling told him to draw the image from his dreams, an epiphany came forth from the paper.
“ He kept saying ‘ I don’t know what it is. I don’t know what it is. … And all of sudden you can just feel the change. He was like, ‘ Oh, my God. ’ … ‘ They bulldozed it. They bulldozed it. All the bodies. They bulldozed it. That’s what it was. ’ And he had drawn a picture in this village where [war authorities ] had made a trench and had taken a bulldozer and covered the trench and buried all these dead. And he had blocked it from his mind until that day when he began drawing the picture, ” Kling said. “ You can’t predict when a memory will come back, and I really believe that if his [mind ] hadn’t thought it was time for him to remember that, the picture would have never become clear to him. ”
Although Kling, who recently moved her Whitebear Studio from Fayetteville to a more rural setting near Berryville in Carroll County, no longer works at the Veterans Administration, she still conducts weekly sessions for patients at Generations, a geriatric ward in Fayetteville that is part of the Washington Regional Medical Center system and deals with patients with various psychiatric problems such as schizophrenia, anxiety, depression and bipolar disorders. She provides the same service to patients at Transitions, a similar ward in Fayetteville that specializes in people with behavioral problems caused by such disorders as Alzheimer’s disease and dementia. “ I think it allows the higher-functioning patients [at Generations ] to express themselves in a non-threatening way, ” said Cris Arias, Washington Regional’s director of psychiatric services. “ Some of them have never painted before and never done art projects before and so they’re just thrilled. They might discover something about themselves. ”
Lack of licenses
Kaminsky, Kling and other art therapists wanted to be sure to tackle a common misconception that anyone can hand someone a paint brush and a blank canvas and even remotely resemble an art therapist. “ I think you can really get yourself into trouble if you don’t have your training, ” Kaminsky said. “ When you use art, you open up people. They open up to feelings and memories and things they didn’t know they had and it’s very powerful. You’re going to be over your head if you don’t know how to make them safe and how to calm them down. ” Art therapy has experienced a surge in popularity in the past decade in response to the aftereffects of several traumatic events, including the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, the war in Iraq and Hurricane Katrina. But the tree of certified art therapy graduate schools remains a small sapling when compared to U. S. colleges and universities’ offerings in related fields such as physical therapy, occupational therapy and psychiatry.
There are only 33 certified graduate school programs in the United States, according to the American Art Therapy Association’s Web site. No Arkansas universities offer an art therapy program. The closest accredited graduate school can be found in Kansas at Emporia State University, located 289 miles from Fayetteville. Emporia State’s program, founded in 1973 by Bob Ault, one of the profession’s forefathers, is one of the nation’s oldest.
Libby Schmanke, an art therapist with her own practice who teaches at Emporia State, said her profession is an obscure one — particularly in the country’s heartland — because of a lack of a state licenses in most states. Neither Arkansas nor Kansas offer such licenses and most states that do have them are on the East and West coasts where a majority of the programs are located.
“ It’s kind of a Catch-22. We can’t get [enough ] art therapists because there’s no licensure, and there’s no state licensure because there’s not enough art therapists, ” Schmanke said.
Schmanke, who pointed out that art therapy was recently listed as one of the 10 hot jobs of the year by www. careerbuilder. com, said that her program has enjoyed a 98- to 100-percent placement rate with students finding jobs anywhere from psychiatric hospitals to women’s prisons.
Oddly enough, of Arkansas’ five accredited art therapists listed on the Art Therapy Credentials Board’s Web site, three are located in Fayetteville: Kaminsky, Kling and Kevin Williams.
“ Fayetteville is a more creative center, ” said Kaminsky, who was scheduled to start a mask-making workshop on Saturday. “ That makes Fayetteville a little bit more open to the idea of using art as therapy. … Lots of people just don’t know what art therapy is. If you’re in a place where there’s a school, people know a little more about it and there’s jobs for it. In this area, a lot of folks don’t know about it because we don’t have very many. ”
“ I think it’s important that people know it’s here, ” Kling added. “ I think it’s under used, having people realize the creative potential of art media. When people leave art therapy with me, I want them to have the tools so the next time something happens they don’t land back in therapy. ”