Painting together
At our last session before
Christmas one of my stroke-group clients asked me whether he could bring his
birthday present along to the next block in the New Year. The present was a painting class by artist Bob Ross with all the materials. My client asked me whether I could
buy some canvases, one for each of the group members.
I readily
agreed and had the canvases ready for the next sessions. I also dug out the lovely easels that I had
bought with a donation for art materials received a few years ago
and I also reached deep into the arty cupboard for the best paint brushes.
This
was not the first time that I had helped a group of people paint along to Bob
Ross whose painting techniques and art classes on television were very
popular in the 1990s. It is over fifteen years ago that my colleagues and I and
a few adult clients propped the plinths up on end, tied our canvases to them and spent a wonderful evening painting along to a Bob Ross
video. I am sure that I could uncover the very similar but at the same time quite
different set of paintings that we produced.
When my
stroke group arrived for the first sessions of 2015 there was my client with
his case of paints, video, brushes and all the paraphernalia needed for
painting and to his and my delight the whole group was raring to go. I was
surprised because we had two new clients, but they too were up to the
challenge!
This
project was a huge step forward from the painting projects that I did with the
stroke groups when I was training at the Pető
Institute. This was what the clients called ‘real art’.
They
were all incredibly proud of the results that turned out much more varied than
my previous attempts at Bob Ross classes many years ago. Most of the present
stroke group have artistic leanings, sew and paint and create at home, and I
think they found it difficult to follow exactly what Bob Ross told us to do,
they wanted to put a bit of themselves into the paintings, which they certainly
did.
 |
| This was everyone's favourite |
It is
lovely to see that the clients in the stroke group are beginning to bring their
own projects into the group, to try out with their fellow group members, in the
same way that the school children in the afternoon group do. The children have
just organized a Star Wars fan-club visit, they cook together, have make-up
sessions together and we are creating a garden. Each project is motivated by a special
interest of one or two individuals.
The
InBestForm inclusive disabled/non-disabled group for elderly clients was designed
so that it could carry on in a similar way to the projects that I have
described above: self-motivated and planned projects that the clients
themselves can organise.
As you can probably guess it was not only the adults who wanted to paint along with Bob Ross, once the school children got a hint of what was going on (the canvases where standing on their easels drying when they arrived) they wanted to have a go too.
This was the result of a few hours work by our 9-year-old boy with muscular dystrophy, it is my favourite -
Notes
Bob Ross -
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