Artist explores junction of creativity, dementia
Updated 6:23 pm, Monday, November 11, 2013
Warren Weinstock had one key piece of advice for his classroom of artists: "You can't make a mistake."
In a cozy room in Moldaw Residences, a senior living home in Palo Alto, the 88-year-old resident and retired real estate agent showed off a print depicting a grassy field with tall trees and pink flowers.
"If you don't see this the way it is, don't worry about it. You're going to put down what you see up here," he told the class, tapping the temple of his balding head.
The teacher didn't harbor any illusions that the half-dozen octogenarians staring back him, all his fellow residents at Moldaw, would recall the lesson a day later. Each one had Alzheimer's disease or some other form of dementia and belonged to the center's memory support program.
"We originally were trying to reach them, but we can't," Weinstock, a longtime painter, confided after class. "All we try to do here - if they've got any artistic bent at all - that's where they'll go."
Weinstock isn't a neurologist, but the heart of his class touches on an emerging field of neuroscience that examines the intersection of creativity and dementia.
Scientists have documented cases of individuals with a diagnosed neurological disorder who appear to develop skills in visual arts even as they lose their capacity for language or other abilities. One famous example is Willem de Kooning, the Netherlands-born artist who produced some of what critics consider his greatest work after he was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.
Brain damage and art
This isn't a universal trend among patients with mental disorders. Different disorders that act on different regions of the brain can enable or hinder various kinds of creative expression.
De Kooning aside, Alzheimer's patients tend to lose their grasp of composition and color in the early stages of the disease, a trend that intensifies as the condition develops. Studies show that these individuals produce art with a relatively simple composition and muted selection of colors.
Meanwhile, some patients with frontotemporal dementia have been documented as hanging on to the ability to copy images and increasing their creative output. In particular, people with certain types of primary progressive aphasia - a syndrome that impairs language capabilities - have been shown to become especially creative during their diseases.
The underlying thread may lie in the side of the brain that is affected. The left side is typically responsible for words and language, while the right side controls perception of spatial relationships and the ability to recognize people.
Left side, right side
In a recently published review of studies on the subject, Drs. Zachary Miller and Bruce Miller, two UCSF neurologists, noted that patients with diseases on the left side of their brains - but a healthy right side - tend to develop new artistic ability. Conversely, right-side injuries can have the opposite effect, with patients losing the ability to copy images they see.
In a 2000 study led by Bruce Miller, a small subset of patients with left-sided temporal disease showed both a reinvigorated interest in art and a propensity for creating photorealistic pieces that portrayed animals, people and landscapes. Many also approached their work with a newfound intensity, redoing their pieces over and over again or doing dozens of similar works, his team wrote.
"They weren't necessarily drawn to the visual world before and now are kind of compulsively expressing themselves, communicating through their paintings or in artistic endeavors," said Zachary Miller, an instructor of neurology at UCSF's Department of Neurology and its Memory and Aging Center.
It's less understood whether creating art can actually improve brain health, he said.
But anecdotally, "I feel overall there's a benefit to engagement, whatever that kind of engagement is," he said. "If it's something that people take pride and pleasure and derive joy from, then that itself is extremely important.
"And the nice thing about the arts - music, the visual arts, painting, drawing - is its accessibility, its universality. There's not really a right or a wrong."
Returning to painting
That's the main lesson Weinstock tries to impart during his painting classes, which he holds twice a month. He studied fine arts at the Academy of Art in San Francisco, went on to a 55-year career in real estate, and finally dived back into painting around the time his first wife died in 2006.
Now the grandfather of three is planning to show off his artwork this month at the Oshman Family Jewish Community Center in Palo Alto. He is blind in one eye, but he says his passion allows his mind to envision beyond the present.
As for his students, each one in his class that day finally, slowly dipped a paintbrush into pools of brown, green and orange acrylic paint, and with wide, deliberate strokes, they covered the sheet of paper in front of them.
"They won't even remember what we did today, but it's OK," Weinstock said. "We're here for the moment."
Warren Weinstock's exhibition
When: 10 a.m.-4 p.m. Sunday.
Where: Oshman Family Jewish Community Center, 3921 Fabian Way, Palo Alto.