About once a month, Suzy Volden of Buffalo comes to Hilltop Health Care Center and Gardenview Apartments in Watkins to work her “magic” with a few residents. Using her art skills, a case full of acrylic paint bottles, and a handful of paintbrushes, Volden guides the focus and hands of residents to create beautiful works of art.
Volden’s program, Art 4 Life LLC, is optional for residents who can sign up and, for a small fee, have a one-on-one session to create a painting.
A session starts with the resident getting comfortable at a workspace as Volden begins with some questions to help select a design they’d like to paint from a notebook of samples. What’s your favorite flower? What color house did you grow up in? Did you do this one before? Who would you like to make this for?
A prepared canvas (paper taped to the inside of a pizza box) is loaded up with blobs of acrylic paint, first for the background, then the foreground, and then for fine details. Quickly, a beautiful sky or field of grass is laid down with horizontal strokes that spread the multicolored paint from side to side on the canvas.
Next emerge clusters of trees, clumps of bushes, or a vase or flowerpot – a main subject of the painting. In this case, the blobs of paint may be pulled into a pine tree, or dabbed to mix the colors into a multi-colored flower, for example.
A final step is adding details, such as fine blades of grass in the foreground, snow lying on tree branches, the separation between shoreline and reflection, or falling flower petals.
The painting is labeled, and the pizza box closed around it so it can dry undisturbed. Some time later, the dried painting can be framed and hung in the resident’s room, or in the hallway for all to enjoy.
On one afternoon in March, we saw three women, Lillian Deal, Connie Laubach, and Judy Christenson start and complete their paintings. It is very much a collaborative process. Each painter selects what they want to paint, with prompts from Volden. Paint is squirted onto the canvas for them, but they hold and move the paintbrushes, sometimes with a little guidance. The whole while, they are talking about favorite memories.
“It’s crazy how fast you can make a pretty picture,” said Laubach as she was painting.
Christenson was a little more reticent. “I like it a lot, but I’m not gonna do it,” she said of one design. Once a subject was selected, she told Volden, “You pick a color and I’ll tell you if I like it.”
No matter how the three women approached their projects, they all seemed to enjoy it very much, and each was proud of her finished painting.
About Volden
Suzy Volden has been doing this art therapy full-time for nearly 13 years. She lives in Buffalo and has several residential facilities scheduled throughout each month where she works with residents.
Originally, her work had more “therapy” in it than art. The purpose was for the therapist to help document changes in movement and cognitive impairments of the patients. Volden has moved away from that therapy, “reporting” function, and she focuses now more on the art and the connection with the person doing the painting.
With COVID-19, and facilities shutting down for a long period, Volden had to adapt how she worked. But she continued to help people create beautiful paintings, even while sitting outside and using mirrors and Plexiglas taped to the window.
It’s clear that she enjoys what she does. She has it down to a smooth process: a rolling case filled with bottles of acrylic paint, carefully cleaning brushes between sessions, and the use of empty pizza boxes as both easel and protective case for each painting. It’s all pretty slick.
Still, nothing beats the look on each painter’s face as they view their finished work with pride.
Volden’s art therapy is a nice addition to the other programs available to residents at Hilltop and Gardenview.