The Arts-Therapy of the 21c Cultural Cord – seminar lecture of the Artis Group El-Kordy

Presented by Noura M. El-Kordy

The arts therapy covers a wide range of clinical conditions, for example anxiety and affective disorders, posttraumatic stress disorder, child abuse and neglect, bereavement, sexual and gender issues, eating disorders as some others.

I have no theapeutical skills, but I had the chance to attend the summer academy for handicapped people this year, as one of our artists Herbert Anibas contracted as supervisor of the painting workshop. There was not only this course but also theater and some other handicraft workshops. The art therapist is not primarily concerned with making an aesthetic or diagnostic assessment of the client's image. The overall aim of its practitioners is to enable a client to effect change and growth on a personal level through the use of art materials in a safe and facilitating environment.

I got to know Michael – about 40 years old. His first question at our first meeting was: „When is your birthday?“ and he kept it in mind as well as many other birthdays. He is a genius in remembering numbers: He told me how much he paid last year for his mobile phone and how much last month, calculated how long my birthday has passed and informed me about my car license number.

When he realized that I am fascinated by his work, he kept asking me „Look aren’t the coloures great?“ And when I answered „Yes they are wonderful. A great work.“ He started singing and kept on drawing with a shiny smile.

Michael is on medication and I didn’t make it to find out what his mentally handicap exactly was, but he obviously was unstably and partially withdrawn from the reality. His thoughts are different than ours – or are ours different than his? Anyway, he catches the near like small projects, if this project get’s to wide, tricky and complicated he shuts himself away and remains silent.

Michael draws „Sven-Boats“ in summer time while in winter he draws only Santa Claus. He paints with such a devotion as if he has got an important task and he paints these two subjects in a bright, large variety. He has sold a lot of his works!

Michael attended also some hours at the theater-workshop and he had a small role in a stage-play and before performing he was obviously nervous, stuttered a lot and his thoughts kept jumping, but he made his job very good.

Another client I met was Maria – a very strong woman mumbling more than talking, but one gets used to. She was very colourful in her paintings and very concentrated. Her large-format paintings where clear and conceptual catching mother nature. I was impressed by her thrustfulness and tender economy. Every day before leaving she wrapped her left acrylics coloures in aluminium foil so she could use them the next day.

Maria is playing accordion – Austrian music and she was very happy when we asked her if it would be possible to hear some parts. You can see here on the picture how happy she felt.

Maria is trainning with a collegue and they have produced a cd.

The creative process is healing and life enhancing. We can catch the primitiveness of childhood in each of the drawings and paintings, as most of these people have another access to life and due to that they show us the colourfulness of their thoughts.

I would like to draw your attention for a minute on Gugging – The Art/Brut Center near Vienna in the Vienna Woods. The opening of the Guggin Museum in 2006 was preceded by a long journey on the road of art and psychiatry and was erected in 1890 as a ward of a psychiatry institution. The Gugging Museum is designed as an exhibiton venue for the artistic genre „Art Brut“, this is what the French artist Jean Dubuffet named an original art which bears witness of an extremly personal and unconventional language of shapes. Its creators are not trained artists and do not concern themselves with the respective current art and its trends.

That is what these people did in the summer academy like Michael and Maria. I hope that I will meet them again and that I will have the chance once more to work with them, as they showed me free access to art.

Thank you very much for your attention.