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Painting Memories
The Daily Camera
Ask Estelle Manaster how old she is, or how long she's lived in Boulder, and she glances away, a puzzled look on her face. She changes the subject.
But ask her to illustrate her past and she puts brush to paper, using painstaking strokes and brilliant colors to render images of sunny days on the shores of Lake Michigan.
While Alzheimer's disease has robbed Manaster of her short-term memory, her recollection of happier days in Chicago is still sharp, as is her artistic skill.
"It's an explanation of your emotions," says Manaster, 86. "It it's a mean-looking thing, you are angry at the world that day. The more beautiful it is, the more it shows you care about the world."
Manaster is one of 65 people with Alzheimer's — one of two from Boulder county — who will showcase their art June 12 at the Eight Annual Memories in the Making Art Auction in Denver. The annual fund-raiser is the centerpiece for the state-wide program, which brings Alzheimer's patients together weekly to express with paint what they often can no longer say with words.
Each year, a jury of artists selects one painting from each of the assisted living centers participating in the program. This year, 12 of those paintings will be paired with pieces from professional artists who used the patient's artwork for inspiration. For the Alzheimer's Association Rocky Mountain Chapter the auction is expected to fetch more than $100,000 for research. For the patients and their families, the program offers a communication link that, for many, is slipping away.
"There are islands of preservation, tasks and skills that remain possible for people even well into the disease," says Dr. Chris Filley, an Alzheimer's expert with the University of Colorado Health Sciences Center.
"Even someone who cannot remember what they had for breakfast may be able to draw a painting."
He said the hippocampus — the portion of the brain that controls short-term memory — often goes first, leaving Alzheimer's patients unable to learn new things and confused about the here and now. Subtle speech abnormalities also come early, often deteriorating to a point where some patients are mute.
But the cerebral cortex, which stores distant memories and lifelong skills, is often the last to go. So Alzheimer's patients are often left with the maddening combination of a sharp recollection of the past, but no way to talk about it.
"Through the artwork, we get their stories," says Joanne Fisher, chairwoman of the Memories in the Making art auction committee for the past eight years.
Many patients revert to childhood memories when they get a brush in their hand, painting teddy bears and baby dolls.
One participant can't speak more than a sentence or two but still paints the vivid wildflowers that grew on the ranch where she spent her childhood.
Another, who could no longer speak to his wife or daughter, painted fish.
"They saw that and said, 'If he can remember the fish, then maybe somehow he hasn't forgotten me,'" Fisher says.
Manaster studied art at the University of Chicago and has painted since childhood. She has lined the walls of her room at Balfour Retirement Center in Louisville with her artwork from past and present. Each image draws a flood of memories.
An oil painting of a woman reading a book on her back patio in Chicago: It was lush and green, Manaster recalls, with a park nearby and a rope swing.
A color-splashed cityscape of the view from the high-rise she one lived in. It was on the 18th story, she says, and you could see the lake in the distance.
She doesn't remember what inspired her recent painting, "The creature," a vivid watercolor of a giant reptile basking in a ray of sunlight. It will be featured at the auction next week.
"I do like that one," she says.
Seventy-eight-year-old Dorothy Motoh, spent three months — a few brush strokes at a time — creating her painting, which Memories in the Making titled "Sweet Peas," after its vibrant summer colors. It will be paired with an illustration of the perennial Sweet Pea by botanical artist Susan Rubin.
Motoh has always been good with her hands, sketching pictures of her grandchildren, sewing and decorating cakes, her daughter says.
But Motoh, in the throes of late-stage Alzheimer's disease, can't explain what inspired her chosen painting. Her speech is too jumbled. She is too confused.
She benefits from Memories in the Making nonetheless, says Lindsay Gordon, who runs the program at Frasier Meadows where Motoh lives. Just a brush in her hand, gently guided by Gordon's, seems to soother her.
"With Dorothy, it's more about what's happening right now when I'm with her," says Gordon.
"For a lot of them, it's about very intimate contact that they often don't get anywhere else."