At Arts Access, we celebrate the freedom of self-expression that our artists experience when making their art. But expressing yourself and finding your inner voice are sometimes a more challenging tasks than you might think. Stephen Haluska, one of our visual art facilitators, shares a story with us today about words, communication, and painting.
People struggle so much to put thoughts and feelings into speech that when presented with a happy occurrence or moment of beauty, something significant to them, to jokingly quip that “they should have sent a poet.” Because it is a common, shared experience to feel inadequate to the task of describing with words the tumult of emotions flashing through one’s mind.
I work with a population that knows this struggle all too well. Many of my clients are non-verbal, which compounds the difficulty they have with making a connection with others. They think, they feel, but lacking a voice they’re overlooked as a person with the same capacity for thoughts and opinions as anyone. Even my clients that are verbal will agonize about being understood properly, in the way that they mean. Much as I do myself. When thinking of my clients and their desire to connect with others, I’m reminded of one such moment with a particular client of mine: Phil Fisher.
Phil is a talkative guy for someone that doesn’t say a word and he goes to great lengths to communicate. He works steadily on all of his paintings and Phil knows what he wants, and Phil had just finished a painting. The painting was a simple one: divided in half horizontally with one side orange and the other blue. It doesn’t get much simpler, but even so, the process of executing Phil’s artistic decisions to create this painting was no less exacting than for any other painting. It came as no surprise to me that Phil wanted to give the painting a title.
He titled it: “Talk to Me”
Thanks again to our visual art facilitator Stephen Haluska for sharing this story with us! To stay up to date on all the latest news and projects from Arts Access, be sure to join our email list and follow us on social media.
