Glenna Stearman Park, Color Therapy

Glenna Park, Geometric Study 5

Over a five-year period, I had to deal with cancer, heart attacks, diabetes, arthritis and knee replacement in cascading events that stopped me in my tracks.  Keeping up with my interest in art, I had to develop a strategy for making art when I was having trouble with my hands and my general energy level. 

I decided to scribble and just work with developing my own sense of color.  I had used scribbling with oil pastels sticks where I drew colors on top of each other, creating unexpected color-combinations.  I rubbed colors into each other and sometimes scratched through layers of color.  When I taught this method to students, they each received the same box of colors and white paper, but the results were as different as each person’s handwriting.  

 

Eventually, I decided to do flower drawings from my yard.  The drawings were also in oil pastel crayons.  I layered colors in the flower drawings and realized that the colors were similar to my oil pastel, scribble-journal drawings.  I started framing the flowers, side-by-side with the scribbles to further emphasize the colors.  These combination pieces enhanced the mood of the art.  The color development and flower studies were psychologically satisfying. 

A therapist has convinced me that painting regularly translates my feelings into a positive, healing state of being.  I paint every afternoon. There is definitely a medicinal translation through color. After teaching color theory all my life, I am now doing color therapy with myself.

Although the painting at right is not mine, I love it for its peacefulness.  The tiny spots of orange, red, yellow and purple make the blues and greens lively. Wish this were my own work! (“The Window” was painted in 1970 by Vladimir Zhivotkov (1940-2005).

Flowers are coming into season, but before I continue with the studies, I decided to do small geometric paintings, where the full color palette comes from 4 basic colors:  red, blue, yellow and white.  All the range of colors come from mixing these basic colors.  Recent paintings reflect my response to cardiac events where dark colors intrude.  I work to make it brighter.  I paint from my gut to raise my mood!  I do not have to think about it so much as let my choices be instinctual. 

These geometric shapes are part of what I call the “Crusty Edge Aesthetic,” due to my shaky hands.  Straight lines are hard to paint, and I do not want to tape edges.  I have graduated from tiny geometric paintings to much larger ones that take about three days to complete.  The edges are still an issue, but that gets better with practice and patience.

I have been doing color therapy for 50 years. In my first job, teaching painting as a graduate student at UCSD, I kept track of the mental status of students by the colors they used.  When I taught in a Texas prison, I worked with a med school psychiatrist, evaluating the psychological status of my prison students. Understanding a student’s mood was a safety issue.  Christmas time at the jail, my students were painting angels.  One prisoner was making an angel with a vertical line down her body and then a horizontal cut at the neck, the waist, the hips and the knees—choosing green and orange in a checker board design.  I told him I thought that was an unusual color choice for an angel and did he have a story.  He said it was his wife.  I asked where she was and he said, “She died.” 

Casually, I worked my way to the office that had a one-way window to the studio.  I asked a nun who was working in there if she knew the story about the student and told her about the unusual way he painted the angel.  The nun warned me he had murdered his wife and had cut her body up in the pattern of the painted angel.  I was happy to note that he was heavily medicated and seemingly happy to be painting angels.  

Teaching in a private school, I could tell when students were in a nose-dive by the colors they chose.  When I noticed students making a major color change in their work that lasted a few weeks, I notified the school psychologist to check in on them.  If it seemed excessive, I contacted parents.  At the same time I taught students how to mix colors and the basic color theory from Josef Albers’ The Interaction of Color.  The study of color is significant for the way we live and feel.  Many references are available for understanding the colors with which we surround ourselves. 

For myself, after being slammed by medical issues, I decided that I have “been there, done that,” and am going to make art for the rest of my life.