8A | WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 1, 2018 | SIUSLAW NEWS
ART from page 1A
PHOTOS BY JARED ANDERSON/SIUSLAW NEWS
Spruce Point artists practice art
in a variety of media each week,
led by their activities coordina-
tors and a desire to connect to
nature and their memories.
of crayon that brings them back to
their childhood.
“Texture is very big,” Turner
said. “They can feel that and it can
take them to somewhere that is,
hopefully, comforting for them.”
Color is also a big component
in helping express an artist’s per-
sonality, the importance of which
can be seen in Moss’ work.
Moss has 60 percent vision loss.
“Because of that, reds, oranges
and yellows are the colors I see the
best, so those are the ones I tend
to drift towards,” she said.
Her artwork pops out from the
canvas, with flowers saturated in
various warm shades of red. It
creates a different vision of nature
not generally seen.
“And I love painting nature,
trees, the ocean, birds,” she said.
“When I go outside and sit on the
patio here, there are all these birds
that fly around and they’re just
chirping away. To me, it feels like
they’re rejoicing. Praising God.
Other people don’t hear that, but
I do. ‘I’m happy to be alive, tweet,
tweet.’”
Moss said that not everybody
in assisted living appreciates the
art projects.
“There’s a couple of residents
here who go, ‘Oh, that’s silly and a
waste of time.’ Honey, if you don’t
like it, don’t do it,” she advised.
“People who are traditionalists,
or who have been forced into ear-
ly retirement, all they can think
about is going back to work. They
live their job. That’s not the world,
sweetie.”
Moss credited Spruce Point
with giving her the time, and the
opportunity, to help develop her
artistic expression, which is some-
thing she felt she couldn’t do in
the past.
“I think now that we’re older,
we should have the opportuni-
ty to explore our creativity more
than we did when we had to have
a 9-to-5 job,” she said. “Now that
we’re older, there should be no
limits.”
Photographer Brigitt Lyon
couldn’t wait to get out of her ca-
reer to pursue art. She had worked
in different media all of her life —
drawing, painting and photogra-
phy. She spent most of her career
as an administrative secretary,
which took her to cities like Ber-
lin, which she found to be “quite
the experience.”
But her job as a whole?
“Boring stuff,” she said. “I’m
sorry, but it was office work.”
It wasn’t until 2003 when she re-
tired that she really hit the ground
running when it came to her true
passion — photography. She had
always loved the medium but
found developing intimidating.
“I was given a digital camera,
and that’s really more instanta-
neous, and I really started playing
around with it,” Lyon said. “I just
enjoyed it very much.”
She grew up in Prussia, close to
the Baltic Sea, and Lyon’s family
would take vacations to the pen-
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with myself to get in bigger dis-
plays gave me something to work
for.”
Carmical doesn’t paint much
anymore, as she finds it difficult
to get around. But she hasn’t lost
her artistic touch. She’s taken
prints from her original paintings
and places them on cards that are
sold in the area.
She said she couldn’t think of
anything better.
“Art enriches your life,” Car-
mical said. “You see things that
you’ve never seen before. You see
shapes, you see shadows. You see
so many things. It’s a must in your
life. All of us need a creative outlet
of some kind or another. It does
enrich your life.”
The community can see these
artists, along with many others,
at the Art for Our Lives art show
on Wednesday, Aug. 8, from 1 to
4 p.m. at Spruce Point, located
at 375 9th St. in Florence. The
event, which is free to attend, will
include a wine walk, hors d’oeu-
vres, tours of Spruce Point and a
chance to meet the artists.
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insula. The area had dunes and
pine forests, right down to the wa-
ter’s edge.
“It wasn’t until I settled here
that I said, ‘My goodness, I’ve seen
this before,’” she said.
It was just like coming home.
“In Oregon, I think we’re real-
ly blessed with such beauty. You
can’t help but try and capture it.
The landscape just begs for it,” she
added.
And it’s capturing that land-
scape that fulfills a need inherent
in everyone.
“It’s part of the creative nature
that we’re born with,” Lyon said.
“And it’s satisfying. You know,
the world around us is just full of
amazing things. It just wows me
what we see.”
Like Lyon, Audrey Carmical
couldn’t wait to get to her art. She
didn’t learn how to paint until she
was 30 but has painted steadily
since then.
“From about 30 on, I would say,
‘I get my work done, and then I
can paint,’” Carmical said. “I loved
it.”
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“Art shouldn’t end just because
they reside here in small quarters,”
said Heidi Turner, assistant direc-
tor of activities.
Turner works specifically with
memory care residents, while
Director of Activities Annette
Posten works with those in assist-
ed living. Throughout the week,
they help guide residents through
a multitude of art projects on var-
ious media, including wood, clay,
jewelry, fabric, watercolors and
acrylic paint.
“They’re very proud of what
they’ve done,” Posten said. “We
needed to help them show it off.”
The residents put in countless
hours on art projects, with some
finding completion months after
the brush first graced the canvas.
“The families see their work
that they put endless hours into, as
they’re doing it, or as it’s done, but
they don’t see all the other work
that is done,” Turner said.
The artists at Spruce Point run
the gamut from first-timers to
seasoned pros. In fact, there are
artists in the facility who have had
their paintings sold and shown
internationally, including Carol
Van Curler, who won the Thiess
Riverprize Commemorative Art
Project for her work depicting
the Siuslaw River Basin. She lives
in the assisted living section of
Spruce Point.
“I quit working at the Mapleton
Post Office in 1979 and went up to
Portland in the art school up there
for a year,” Van Curler said. “Then
I came back and started painting
full time in 1980.”
Her medium of choice is oil
or acrylic — watercolors are too
hard.
She comes for all the art proj-
ects that Spruce Point holds, even
if she isn’t feeling very artistic that
day. She laughed at a small paint-
ing she did of a lighthouse.
“I hate to tell you this, but I
wasn’t feeling good that day and
I really didn’t want to paint,” she
said. “So, I painted the least I could
just so I could present something.”
The lighthouse she did paint
was exquisitely detailed.
For Van Curler, art is a form of
memory, encapsulating how she
sees the world.
“I like to present things the way
I see them,” she said. “Maybe that’s
egotistical, but I think I see things
better than other people.”
Her favorite painting, the only
one she’s refused to sell, is one of
the Mapleton Covered Bridge that
resided just beside the post office
she worked at. The bridge was
torn down in 1971, but her por-
trayal of the bridge and how she
viewed it at the time is a portal
into her past, a specific time and
place she lived in and how she
viewed herself within it.
“I’m never going to sell it,” she
said. “I still have it. I sell every-
thing else, and I’ve sold a lot. But
I’ll never sell that.”
Memory, time and art are in-
trinsically linked.
“Typically, for someone with a
form of dementia, Alzheimer’s or
otherwise, art helps them to stay
focused and relaxed,” Turner said.
The purpose of art is not in the
finished project, but in the process
of doing it. The strokes of a brush,
the mixing of the colors. It’s creat-
ing beauty in the moment.
“They could be doing some-
thing beautiful, but the second
they look away, they just lost what
they were doing,” Turner said.
“You won’t have something for
several days, but with encourage-
ment and a little bit of coaxing,
they get back into it. That’s why
we’re so impressed with what they
come up with.”
While helping the artists back
into their work is a necessity,
Turner said that they inherently
know what piece of art is theirs.
“They know if they usually like
to draw straight lines or shapes,”
she said. “Let’s say you never in
your life attempted to draw an
animal, and all of a sudden there’s
two horse heads looking at you.
You know that’s not yours.”
The art that the group creates
is inherently linked to who the
artists are, and repeatedly recre-
ating aspects of their personality
in their work creates a connection
that transcends cognitive memo-
ry.
The texture of the different me-
dia can also create a link to the
past: a piece of wood that recalls
a calming moment, the waxy feel
“I had a lot of small oil paint-
ings drying with the fan, and
they weren’t good at all,” Carmi-
cal said. “And my husband said,
‘I think you need lessons.’ That
was an understatement.”
She started taking classes in
watercolor because she felt wait-
ing for oil to dry was tedious. She
liked the fast nature of watercol-
ors, and the pristine look of it.
Carmical said that every artist
has to pick the medium that best
fits their personality.
“I was addicted to painting —
my passion was painting,” she
said.
She was a school teacher for
a while, then a housewife. She
would clean the house as quickly
as possible just so she could get
to her studio. When her husband
retired, he made frames and
helped with matting.
“We moved to Florence, and
they had exhibits that I’d com-
pete in,” she said. “Competing
was just for myself. First, I got
in a rack in one room, and then
I got on a wall. Just competing
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