The healing arts

LITTLE ROCK — The arc of emotions in a hospital is no arc at all but an erratic EKG monitor.

You slide into an MRI tube and your anxiety spikes; you smell the Downy in a shirt from home and comfort returns, if momentarily. Your roommate’s violent cough is a spike and your mother’s loving face, a rebound. A bite of cold meatloaf and a biopsy needle - spike. The Bambi mural and a sip of cold soda, solace. The word “metastasize,” up, up! The morphine shot, down, down, down ....

Because of its constituency, Arkansas Children’s Hospital is all steep peaks and valleys. The clients, children who haven’t grown into their own futures let alone their mortality, tow heartsick parents or grandparents in their wake.

Into this crucible struts Hamid Ebrahimifar with his wagon of art supplies, his voice a fluttering fluty timbre like an Iranian This American Life contributor, his clothes plucked from the Massimo rack at Target.

Here’s Ebrahimifar handing a 7-year-old heart-transplant patient a couple of tongue depressors while he pours paint into kidney shaped emesis basins. Kendrick Stigger throws his toy, a little wooden ball, into one of the bowls, and Ebrahimifar, after a swish, casts the ball upon a blank canvas. Then the two play a table-top game of hockey that results in a kind of Jackson Pollock abstraction, a technique that begs to be called “Pollockey.”

“Oh, man, what kind of painting we trying to make?” Kendrick asks, almost soughing his words.

“A crazy one,” Ebrahimifar says.

“Ooh, I made a shot!”

Ebrahimifar has been one of three artists-in-residence at the hospital for five years. His position is funded by a grant from the Arkansas Arts Council and individual donors, with early support from the Windgate Foundation. Here’s what he’s big on - helping kids who are helpless before not just their illnesses but the cure, too, find some power, even if it’s just a little power over paint.

“I don’t even know what we’re makin’ over here,” Kendrick says.

“That’s the beauty of it,” says Ebrahimifar. “Wait and see.”

NEXT LEAP FOR ART

In another wing Ebrahimifar’s counterpart, Elizabeth Weber, throws on a paper gown, scrubs up and brings Royce Dieckhoff, 6, a plate of medicine cups, each one filled with a primary color so bright and thick you want to touch your lips to it.

The symbolism is just as rich - Here’s your medicine, Royce, now begin your treatment.

There’s evidence that active arts education in a hospital setting helps patients cope with pain and express difficult feelings. There’s further evidence that it aids patient compliance with certain medical regimens.

Gloriane Kabat, director of child life and education at the hospital, believes art therapy “speeds up recovery,” and in a health-care environment in which many units operate short-staffed, some published accounts tell of patients who require less of nurses’ time when art projects are incorporated into the daily plan, while in a piece published in Hospital Development in 2001, three authors found a positive correlation between nurses’ employment decisions (to stay or move into a hospital or unit) and the presence of an active arts program.

There are even administrators who believe that the presence of art and artists in a hospital is a net gain for hospitals - that art saves money - but no comprehensive study supports this.

In fact, evidence that art reduces pain or accelerates recovery is largely anecdotal.

This, says Society for the Arts in Healthcare director Anita Bowles, is the next frontier in the field, because two recent surveys show that nearly half of all health-care institutions report having an arts program. So, if hospitals are implementing arts therapy, maybe there should be some qualitative proof of its effectiveness.

Of the hospitals surveyed, 23 percent have art permanently displayed on walls, and 15 percent provide bedside art activities of the kind at Children’s Hospital.

“It’s very anecdotal still, but that’s definitely the next step forward,” Bowles says.

With a catheter line trailing his left arm and an IV line taped to his right hand, little Royce, who has cystic fibrosis, scoops a dollop of red paint onto his brush.

SURGEON’S STEADY HAND

With a surgeon’s steady hand he makes the thick outline of a rocket fuselage on a bright new piece of paper. He asks for a swish in the rinse bucket, then it’s yellow for some big juicy stars. Another swish, and it’s over to orange for the rocket booster’s fiery tail.

Children’s Hospital’s 2011 calendar showcases student art projects for the first time. It opens to a brief description of the work of Ebrahimifar and Weber and a third art therapist, Laura Phillips, who is part time and paid separately by The William Randolph Hearst Foundations’ Endowed Fund for Children’s Cancer, and features 12 months of student art projects.

In an hour Royce races through several archetypal little-boy mind-scapes-a rocket shooting through the stars, a malevolent robot, the planet Saturn. The lone terrestrial muse is the ill-fated Titanic, a subject he knows so well that he has in the past painted people bobbing in the water.

When he’s finished, the still-wet piece goes into a pile on the floor.

“It’s not about the product,” Phillips says, observing, “It’s very much about the process ... [and] this little boy is liking the assistance.”

For the older students, though, product matters. The calendar is a veritable yearbook of art projects.

One of them is Trixie & the Wild Pups, a collage inspired by the 17 dogs that visit the hospital as part of the animal-assisted therapy program. These dogs are treated like celebrities by patient and staff alike, so why not make them rock stars? Older artists got together and, with cutout clothing and rock-band instruments from magazines, and actual head shots of the animals, Ebrahimifar and the artists created a kind of stage tableau of the dogs. So here’s another conjecture an administrator may make with some confidence: visual art isn’t just the manifestation of a wild imagination.

Often, the material is a reflection upon some other happy hospital experience.

CRAZY MIXED UP

The next day, in one of the playrooms, Ebrahimifar sits at a too-small table when Eddie Norman, 16, plops down. The artist wants the student to consider “Mail Me” art, a postcard-size drawing or painting that gets mailed to patients in the hospital.

Instead, Norman picks up a piece Ebrahimifar drew.

“What is that? Cool!” he says.

“That? That is just ...,” the artist searches for a name. “A continuous line ... a continuous face.”

It’s the sketch of a fullfrontal face and shoulders made of scribbles, the pen never leaving the page. Alberto Giacommeti, Ebrahimifar’s favorite artist, pioneered it, and it is arguably the most distressingly disordered sketch a person can draw without slipping into total abstraction. Norman wants to see him do it again.

“Have you seen?” Ebrahimifar says. “You can come here with a plan, but it’s very unpredictable. I love it!”

Visual art in the hands of these too-young hospital patients can be expressive or purgative. The patient may, as with Norman or Royce, simply wish to see before them the things they wish to see. Or they may export some of their pain onto the paper.

Weber recently worked with a patient whose session was interrupted for a dreaded breathing treatment. The student began excitedly, exploiting the full spectrum of colors Weber brought along, but when the treatment started he switched to brown and a mix of dark colors, and he dug the brush into the paper and made repetitive circling strokes.

‘HOWEVER LONG IT TAKES’

“We don’t go to try to get the kids to express themselves,” Ebrahimifar says. “We find situations for kids to voluntarily, if not express themselves, then do some activities with art material to forget about what is at hand for at least 10 minutes or however long it takes.”

Here’s one last thing to consider. Serious painting and collage art instruction is something many of the patients at Children’s Hospital have never had. Some even tell Ebrahimifar, Weber and Phillips that they are not artists and cannot “do” art.

The artists “might teach them a simple art technique, and then all of a sudden the child’s enjoying the art they’re doing, and realizing they can do this,”Kabat says.

What’s more, the parent quickly learns that art projects are cheap and require little pre-planning.

And in their world, the world of Children’s Hospital, where the patients must imagine at times their peers running laps at soccer practice or piecing together romantic love over some passed notes in class, art is a success at any stage, says Spencer Ewing, 15, who has been in an out of the hospital his whole life.

“I do think it’s something special. I do think it stands out. Of all the things they offer, it’s something anybody can do, and there’s no wrong way to do it.”

Thea center hosts show Artworks by patients of Arkansas Children’s Hospital, along with instructors Hamid Ebrahimifar, Elizabeth Weber and Laura Phillips, are on display at the Thea Foundation Center for the Arts, 401 Main St., North Little Rock. The show runs through Friday, and the hours are 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. The viewing is free. For more information, call the hospital’s Foundation office at (501) 364-1477.