March 4, 2004
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Augustus "Gus" Clark,
Debbie Zeno and Gerri Sadler, work on a mural at The Studio in
Eureka.
Photo by Linda Mitchell
story & photos by LINDA MITCHELL
"ART BROUGHT ME OUT OF
MY SCHIZOPHRENIA," DALE HOWARD [photo below right] told
me when I met him for the first time at The Studio, an art-filled
space on Third Street in Eureka. It appeared to be an outlandish
claim, but Kristi Patterson backed it up. As director of The
Studio, a program of the Humboldt Community Access and Resource
Center (better known as HCAR), Patterson witnessed Howard's transformation
firsthand.
"If
you knew Dale four or five years ago, you'd never recognize him
today," she said. "He was very, very ill -- not taking
any medications and using drugs and alcohol." He also had
a compulsion for walking in the middle of the road and was often
seen strolling down the centerline on Sixth and Seventh Streets
in Eureka, she said.
Tragedy inevitably struck. "He
was hit by a car while walking [along] Highway 101 and was badly
hurt," Patterson said, adding that Howard's accident may
have been a blessing in disguise. "He was in the hospital
for a long time and had a tough go of it, but at least he was
finally able to get treatment for his illness."
Howard, who is now 47, said
a big part of his rehabilitation was his referral to The Studio
three years ago. Like the roughly 40 other developmentally disabled
adults the program serves, he became part of an environment that,
for the artistically inclined, seems a utopian fantasy.
It's a setting where the participants
are encouraged to work on whatever inspires them, where they
can focus on a single project for the entire day, or move freely
from one creative venture to another. Guidance and inspiration
are readily available, there's plenty of working space, and people
are known by their first names. In fact, if you ask for someone's
last name, everyone has to stop and think about it.
Several of Howard's recent paintings,
sculptures and mosaics were scattered around The Studio's two
large, adjoining workrooms. His work exhibited a bold, primitive
power, much of it featuring his trademark "pyramid eye."
According to Howard, the symbol represents "the ways of
life," and appears again and again throughout his art. "It
gives me a way inward," he explained.
Debbie
Zeno, 44, [photo at left]
suffers from cerebral palsy and
has been coming to The Studio for about a year and a half. In
2002 she won a prize in the State Council on Developmental Disabilities'
poster contest and was recently commissioned to do a large painting
for a local attorney. She donated a sizable portion of the $500
fee she received back to The Studio.
"Debbie lives in excruciating,
chronic pain," Patterson said. "She was born and raised
in the Bay Area and was attending college and working as a preschool
teacher before her disabilities became more severe. She went
into the hospital in 1994 for a hip rotation. As a result of
the operation, she lost functioning in her legs and began to
suffer from chronic pain in her hips. Because of the pain, she
couldn't continue with her job or school -- she couldn't live
independently."
Steve Beatty, one of The Studio's
five teachers (all professional artists), showed me one of Zeno's
recent sculptures, featuring a bent, misshapen figure. "He's
sitting on a TV and he's got a VCR and all his stuff is thrown
everywhere. The satellite dish over there is busted, remote controls
everywhere. Debbie says he's a caveman, who's lost with the technology."
Not
therapy
So is The Studio therapy or
school? There are programs out there "where the artwork
itself is less important than act of doing it, where people are
getting therapeutic value from doing some simple artistic task,"
said Ron Jantz, HCAR's operations manager. The Studio is different.
"Art is, in its very nature, therapeutic, but The Studio
is strictly a fine arts program," Patterson explained. "The
fact that people get many different `therapeutic' side effects
is just a bonus."
"I never wanted it to be
this little art program for retarded people who sit there and
do beads," Patterson went on. "I envisioned it to be
a fine arts center no different from what you find in college."
Of
course, it isn't college. HCAR, a state-funded nonprofit established
in 1955, serves 400 developmentally disabled people in Humboldt
County by obtaining employment for them with local businesses;
by assisting them with the daily chores of living, such as shopping
and paying bills; and, in the case of The Studio, by developing
their artistic sides. And anyway, the social workers from the
outfit that makes most of the referrals to The Studio, the Redwood
Coast Regional Center (RCRC), which funnels state assistance
money to organizations that serve the developmentally disabled
in Humboldt, Del Norte, Mendocino and Lake counties, are hardly
judges of artistic ability.
"What we look for is whether
someone has a strong interest toward art," said Peter Narloch,
the center's community resource manager, speaking recently from
his Eureka office.
As a result, just as the "artists"
at The Studio run the gamut in terms of developmental disabilities
-- everything from mental retardation to mental illness -- so
do they have varying levels of skill. What they share is a love
of art -- and that's where the magic comes in.
"It's probably the most
fun I've ever had in my life," said Zeno. "I'm learning
so much. The teachers are great, the other students are great
-- we laugh all day long. The senses of humor that go around
in this room, you wouldn't believe it. Some days it's absolutely
wild."
But it's serious business, too,
as evidenced by the fact that The Studio holds regular exhibits,
including one this Saturday at the monthly Arts Alive! event,
and sells the artwork through its gift shop and a Web site. "We
put together very professional shows here, with postcard invitations
and receptions," said Beatty, explaining that helping the
participants market their work is an important part of the program,
and many of them do quite well.
Take Howard, for example. "He
makes five or six paintings every time he's here and sells them
all [to his friends] before he comes back the next time. It's
hard to get a show of his together," Beatty said.
"We see people's self-esteem
just totally skyrocket, especially when they start showing and
selling their work," added Patterson, who noted that the
artists get a 70 percent cut of the sale of their art. (The normal
artist-gallery cut is 50-50 or 40-60.) The prices fetched by
the artwork are modest -- generally from $50 to $200 per piece.
But making big sales is not the point; developing confidence
is.
Eureka resident Patricia Powell
is a major patron of The Studio. She has bought more than 10
pieces over the past five years -- to show support for what she
considers a worthy organization, but also because she thinks
some of the work produced at The Studio has genuine artistic
value.
"I've always bought `outsider
art,' art that's on the fringes of society," Powell explained.
"Outsider art is brave, unpretentious. One thing that really
appeals to me [about The Studio] is that the people there are
unaware of their limitations. This is the one place where they
can create something without the threat of failure.
"So that's a big deal right
there," she continued. "But the results are sometimes
astounding. Their art is never dull, it's very bracing. You can
just see the creative impulse bursting forth."
A
collaboration
When I visited The Studio for
the first time last month, Howard was working on a mural with
several other people. Everyone in the room was dressed in Humboldt
County layers, topped off with paint-stained aprons or smocks,
making it impossible to distinguish the students from the teachers.
The
artists comprised a melting pot of disabilities. "Developmental
disabilities include things like mental retardation, epilepsy,
cerebral palsy, traumatic brain injury, mental illnesses, things
like that," Patterson explained. "Any kind of disability
that happened before the age of 18," the cut-off point for
being eligible for state assistance.
The mural (dubbed "Studio
Madness" upon completion) was the second of what would become
a series of collaborative paintings with Augustus "Gus"
Clark, a local professional artist. Clark said his relationship
with the "HCAR folks" began last June, during the North
Coast Open Studio Tour. "Steve [Beatty] brought a lot of
these folks up to my studio, and we all really hit it off. They
seemed to really respond to my work."
That isn't surprising. A self-described
"Expressionist" trained at UC Santa Cruz under the
late Eduardo Carrillo, Clark's work exhibits much of the same
bold color and naive power found in the work of The Studio artists.
Beatty and Clark came up with the idea of a collaborative project.
It helped that Clark's studio, one of the "C Street Studios,"
is located right next door.
The group's first completed
mural, which they titled "The Golden String," is filled
with whimsical, poignant iconographic imagery, dominated by a
massive sun with a mustache painted by Soodie Whitaker, a young
man with Down syndrome. Howard's "eyes" peer out at
the viewer from a variety of places. It's a surprisingly
cohesive piece, considering that several artists worked on it
at the same time. I wondered how they had gone about it.
"Gus supplied the wood,
we supplied the paints, and anyone who wanted to get involved
could," Beatty explained. "Some people just weren't
interested, but everyone who wanted to got to paint."
Clark said his plan was to begin
with what he called the "old Zen tradition," making
heavy black lines, and then filling them in. "At first I
thought everyone could do self-portraits, but then I thought,
just let them be natural, do their own thing. Everybody has their
own voice, and we all worked together in this kind of concert."
He was clearly enjoying himself.
"I love it!" he exclaimed. "I'm having a great
time, and I'm learning a lot from these folks."
According to Patterson, this
is a common response from people who work with The Studio's artists.
"The nature of the art people do here is really inspiring
for the teachers. All the time you hear things like, `Wow, did
you see what Pablo did? I'm going to try that!' The people here
have little prior experience and no preconceived ideas of what
art should be, so their art is very free. They don't worry about
whether or not it's right, they just do it and it turns out great."
Patterson said she's enjoying
the unfolding partnership between Clark and The Studio artists.
"Gus and I went to school together and I was really excited
to see he had a studio right next door. Everybody came back from
his open studio so inspired about his work. It's so great that
he wants to work with the artists here, and he really fits in.
I go in and they're just talking away, eating with one hand,
painting with the other."
Zeno said everyone loves working
with him. "He makes you loosen up. A lot of the artists
here, like myself, are too tight, but Gus just takes you to that
place where you open up and paint wild things."
Beginnings
The Studio program was Patterson's
brainchild. The 34-year-old Humboldt native says she got the
idea when she was living in San Francisco a few years ago. "I
was doing supportive living -- working with disabled people in
their homes. Some of them went to a program called `Creativity
Explored.' It was a lot like what we're doing here, but on a
much larger scale."
When Patterson later moved back
to Eureka and got a job working for HCAR, she discovered there
was no similar program in Humboldt. She decided to take the plunge
and launched The Studio in 1997.
"It was all volunteer for
a couple of years. We started as a program of the Ink People,
but we just weren't able to get licensed under the state. I was
still working for HCAR, so I approached the board and they took
us under," she said.
Patterson said that without
The Studio many of the participants would probably be stuck at
home watching TV. "Many people with developmental disabilities,
especially those who live on their own without families and without
access to transportation, become extremely isolated and depressed.
There are other day programs available, but many of the people
at The Studio have been unsuccessful there for a variety of reasons.
We have people in our program who are assaultive and/or have
other serious behavior issues in other places that very rarely
occur while they're at art."
She says that while there are
also work programs available, not everyone can, or even wants
to work. "Did you know that in California, people with developmental
disabilities who work in `sheltered' type environments doing
menial work like shredding or labeling are paid sub-minimum wages
-- some very low, like 30 cents an hour? They are also paid this
way for things like being part of housekeeping and landscaping
crews. I could go on and on about how I feel that this is slave
labor and should be illegal, but I'll spare you and just say
that if I had the choice between cleaning toilets for a dollar
an hour or painting a piece of art that I might sell for $100
(or not), guess which one I'd pick?"
The Studio program is clearly
a passion, and Patterson is obviously proud of its steady expansion
over the past seven years. "At first it was just a few hours
on Saturdays in Manila, then we moved into one room here [in
Eureka], and then it was two rooms, and now we have four."
On the financial side, The Studio
presently has a $156,000 budget -- a small chunk of HCAR's $4.6
million annual budget, but significant nonetheless. The problem
is that all the money comes from the state and the state's in
a severe budget crisis. More on that in a minute.
The growth of the program has
been a boon to the participants, according to head teacher Megan
Montero. "Once we got this extra room, we opened four days
a week so people could come more often. As with any artist, the
more time they put in, the more their styles develop."
Non-structured assistance in
painting, drawing, sculpting, ceramics, mosaics and performing
arts are offered, Montero said. "I really like the way we
do things here because it gives people the opportunity to work
their own artistic paths."
She noted with amusement that
some of the artists are more aggressive at promoting their work
than others. A 44-year-old artist named Mary Galleti, she said,
has become particularly adept.
"When she has a show, she's
out there on the sidewalk yelling, `Come in here and buy my art!'
And it works. She had a show last September -- it was all inspired
by Elvis -- and she sold 12 out of 13 paintings."
Galleti's disability is Prader-Willi
Syndrome. "It causes a variety of things," Patterson
said. "Physical things, like a shorter stature, cognitive
delays -- and you feel like you're hungry all the time. People
with the disease will eat anything, food that's bad for them,
out of garbage cans, terrible things."
The Studio has helped Galleti
immensely, Patterson said, for the simple reason that it has
allowed her a measure of freedom. "Because of the nature
of her disability, she's supervised all the time, and her days
and nights are just set out for her, what she has to do and when.
When she's here she can basically do what she wants, and she's
found more of a purpose. When she was working on her show, she
was so focused, so serious about it."
A
cloudy future
Things are serious on the fiscal
front, there's no doubt about that. "The system [for assisting
people with disabilities] as a whole, across the state, is closer
to collapse than it has ever been," Jantz, the operations
manager, said grimly.
"The state that California
is in, it's hard for everybody -- anyone in human services and
education is really frightened," Patterson added. The hoped-for
passage of two bond measures in this week's vote would likely
stave off the elimination of The Studio program, and of larger
HCAR programs as well. But, as Patterson said, there are deeper
problems.
"Workmen's comp [for the
staff] is a big, big part of [why we're struggling]. It's gone
up so much," she said.
Workers' compensation costs
are more than double what they were last year, Patterson said,
same with their medical insurance. "Our expenses keep going
up, but the money we receive from the state stays the same, and
in some cases has been reduced."
To balance the books they've
had to let one staff person go and impose general belt-tightening.
There is, momentarily at least, no money available for art supplies.
Community donations have helped, but the program is still running
at a deficit and supplies are dwindling.
Patterson is submitting grant
applications to fill the gap, including one to the Simpson Foundation
and another to the Humboldt Area Foundation. She figures she
needs between $10,000 and $20,000 for supplies. While she received
a $3,000 Simpson grant a couple of years ago, this is the first
time she's sought major money from private sources.
One
last visit
I went back to The Studio a
month after my first visit there, to check on the progress of
the murals. The artists had completed a total of seven paintings
and were ready to begin the eighth. They said they'd like to
create more before the Arts Alive! opening, but supplies had
become an issue. Their last three murals were painted on beat-up
cardboard, curling at the edges, buckling in the middle. It was
pitiful.
On the day I was there, though,
the group had a real canvas to work on, donated by Beatty. "It
was an old painting of mine that wasn't working anyway,"
he said, shrugging. "I painted over it and brought it on
in."
The artists are accustomed to
using recycled materials. One of the other completed murals,
a menagerie of wild creatures frolicking in a green-painted jungle,
was painted on a large square of plywood donated by Zeno. "I
had already painted the jungle background, then I brought it
in and the other artists added to it. It was just a jungle with
no life, and look what they did with it."
"It has
a weird title," Zeno added, laughing. "It's called
`Schmoo and Lucy would go crazy.' I started the picture for my
two cockatiels, a jungle theme. Gus said if I took it back home,
my birds -- Schmoo and Lucy -- would go crazy. That's how it
got the title."
Clark arrived shortly after
I did and was immediately mobbed like a rock star, with everyone
vying for his attention at once. He introduced me to one of the
artists I hadn't met yet, Jaimal Guynn, an energetic 23-year-old
wearing glasses and a stocking cap. [photo at left]
"Jaimal's learning disability
isn't considered severe enough to qualify for Regional Center
services, so he's a person who could easily fall through the
cracks," Patterson explained. She came up with a work exchange
plan: Guynn volunteers time before and after class washing brushes,
cutting paper, doing janitorial work and other chores in exchange
for studio time.
"He and his mother both
say that they don't know where he'd be without The Studio,"
Patterson added. "It gives him a purpose, and he's made
many friends here."
Guynn said his art has become
more "peaceful" as a result of being at The Studio.
"I think when people do art, they express their feelings
and emotions. When I used to get angry or depressed, I'd draw
my feelings. Now when I draw my feelings, it comes peacefully."
Guynn
has worked on almost all the murals, as has Gerri Sadler, 63,
[photo below right] who lives in "one of the E Street houses"
downtown, a group home where several of The Studio artists live.
She frequently paints her house and its residents, as well as
landscapes and paintings with political themes.
Sadler, who has moderate mental
retardation, said she wants people to know that disabled artists
are just the same as everybody else. "We want to show the
world we can do it," she said. "Don't say we're M-R.
That's not right. You are what you are. You do your best."
The artists began the new mural
on Beatty's donated canvas while I was there. quickly painted
a figure in the upper right hand corner, then Zeno joined her,
then Howard, then others. As I watched them work for a while,
I remembered what Clark had said about the artists painting together
in a concert, with their own unique voices. I could almost hear
an accompanying orchestra.
Clock wise from left: Steve
Beatty, Megan Montero, John Bensch, Kristy Patterson and Gus
Clark hold their portraits painted by Gerri Sadler.
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