LUCID DREAMING
by Beth Elaine Wilson

Painting by Waryas House
resident Mordechai G.

The power of the act of creation is apparent to even the casual onlooker. “In the beginning,” quoth Genesis, “God created the heavens and the earth.” This power inspires some very schizophrenic attitudes in our society, however. We live in a world in which power is carefully doled out, and in which the ever-present demands of the march of progress and technology demand high levels of specialization and sophistication of knowledge, creating a situation where it can be almost impossible to understand the ins and outs of any field foreign to one’s own training. In this world, “art” has come to be just another specialty, and the anointed few who are in the business of making it, marketing it, collecting it, and critiquing it spend all their time talking primarily to one another, like orchid hobbyists discussing the arcane particularities of one hothouse flower compared to another.

Frustration with the solipsistic confines of the insular artworld has led, over the past 10 or 20 years, to the development of a new “specialty” branch of the market, called “Outsider Art.” This rubric includes work from a wide range of people, from prisoners to rural Southern Pentecostal visionaries, to Australian Aborigines. Suddenly, the newly recognized “artistic” production of these individuals, who share in common only their lack of inclusion in the traditional artworld, became a commodity— Aboriginal artists, who previously made their cultural artifacts on stone walls in the Outback were introduced to the rather foreign medium of paint on canvas (the better to have portable commodities to offer for sale in the gallery). Howard Finster rose to prominence by being commissioned to apply his colorful, chimerical style to the cover of a Talking Heads album. After a time, the inevitable stories came out, accounts of these artworld-ignorant artists being taken advantage of by unscrupulous art dealers, bilked out of work and/or money by a system that was simply foreign to them.

But this is a story of how “art” conspires to cover over the real source of empowerment, the reason why all these “outsiders” were driven to create objects and images in the first place. Ultimately, it is the very power of the act of creation that drives people to make this sort of work, as well as providing the pretext for squelching this impulse in our “advanced” society. Creativity is a dangerous thing, because it prompts people to ask the loaded question “Why?” Why is “art instruction” offered in the schools in parsimonious 45-minute periods, once or twice a week? Why isn’t it integrated into the rest of the curriculum? And have you ever noticed how most five-year-olds feel pretty confident expressing themselves visually with construction paper and crayons, while most 15-year-olds will demur such an invitation, moaning something about “not being able to draw”? This is nothing more nor less than the logical conclusion to a program of compulsory self-alienation, the professional installation of self-doubt. Like most institutions in our society, the school system has much more invested in the perpetuation of its own power than it does in inspiring empowerment in its young charges. If the students persisted in asking too many questions, creating too much of a ruckus, you could never get them all herded into the proper classrooms in the interval between the bells.

Every once in a while, however, you can catch a glimpse of something quite different, an instance where re-connecting with the very basic human drive to create, in a way that does not replicate the disempowering messages that dominate most of the culture. The mid-Hudson art community was the unwitting recipient of just such a vision last month, in the exhibit last month at Gabriel’s Kitchen on John Street in Kingston, of work by the men of Waryas House, a community residence and recovery program run by REHAB Programs, Inc. in Poughkeepsie. The program works with people with developmental difficulties who also suffer from chemical dependency, and includes a fully-integrated art therapy program run by Sarah Greer Mecklem. She began the program in 1995, first in the residence itself and then in a rough-hewn workshop space next door, which they named the “Art Garage.” In this studio, residents find the quiet in which to make visual images that express the things that can’t be said in words or actions. Many of the men have developmental delays that compromise their ability to speak or write clearly, and they often find great release in being able to express themselves through the visual language of shape and color.

The work in the exhibit at Gabriel’s certainly illustrated the vivid directness of this alternative form of communication. From Ronald S.’s Pattern Paintings, based on African textile patterns, to Leroy J.’s amazing Laundry Dog, which presents a domestic interior including a thickly-outlined dog sitting adjacent to a glass-fronted washing machine, colorfully flattening the space to create a world of intriguing spatial ambiguity, the paintings virtually jumped off the wall, inviting the viewer to see a small corner of the artist’s world. Mecklem notes that many of the men, while developmentally disabled, are fairly “high functioning,” and as such, to the casual observer, may only have looked like “some of the dropouts hanging out on the corner,” often not completing their education due to a range of undiagnosed difficulties, and ultimately turning to drugs in an effort to self-medicate for conditions that can include schizophrenia, depression, bipolar disorder, and others. Looking at the artwork, one has an entirely different way of viewing and understanding these men, appreciating the inner beauty that each has discovered through the process of making. Understandably, the power of creation here is put to the service of personal recovery, of helping the individual pull his world back together again to find a path out of chemical dependency and back into society.

According to Mecklem, some of the men really take to the habit of making the work, continuing to return to the Art Garage to work even after they’ve moved out of the residence to continue their lives beyond rehab. The program’s relationship to the community has followed a similar, if reversed, trajectory. For a number of years, Mecklem organized two exhibitions a year at the Art Garage, which developed a small but devoted following of artists and art lovers who regularly helped to support the program by buying one-of-a-kind cards and calendars. Over time and due to popular demand, it was decided to allow artists who had progressed in the program and their recovery (usually for 12 or more months) to volunteer work to be offered for sale. Two-thirds of the sale price goes to the artist’s personal account, the remainder goes to cover materials costs, etc. The show at Gabriel’s represents a new phase of public exposure for the program, as it was the first exhibition that has taken the work to the public at large, and it proved spectacularly successful—within a few days of the opening, all the available work had sold (for extremely modest prices: the most expensive piece went for $21). Most popular were the Walking Sticks, a regular feature of the art program. Mecklem has the artists select slender saplings in the woods, peeling off the bark to reveal the soft inner wood, which is then sanded perfectly smooth. After planning a pattern on paper, the artist transfers the drawing to the stick, burning it into the surface with a special tool, often improvising on the design in the process.

The walking sticks provide a beautiful metaphor of what art and art-making can really do for people—and not just people in rehab, either—they are proof that the active engagement with one’s inner creativity is beautiful, useful, and can provide something to help us through those difficult times, when standing on our own two feet can otherwise seem almost impossible.

Waryas House is a community residence and recovery program operated by REHAB Programs, Inc., in Poughkeepsie. For more information about the program, call (845) 452-1913, extension 101.