Covid kept me away from The Mansion for over a month. But today I was back in the Memory Care building.
We sat around a table in the activities room. First, it was only Ron who showed up, but then Peg came to join us from the main building and Bev soon after that.
I took an idea from my friend Emily and cut out a bunch of vase shapes from some collage paper she gave me. My plan was to let each person choose a vase then draw flowers in it with markers. I showed them an example to give them an idea of what they could do.
Ron was more interested in fishing so we turned his vase on its side and with that as inspiration, he drew a fish in water.
Peg got right to it even as she protested that she didn’t know how to draw. But I knew better. I’ve been watching Peg make beautiful drawings for over a year and I told her so.
I love the way she overlapped her flowers and filled in the space between the stems with leaves.
Bev asked for some help, so I drew a few stems for her, then she did the rest. Her flowers are so intentional, even though they may not look like flowers we’re used to seeing. When I asked her to sign her picture, she wrote her first name and drew a picture for her last name. A sure sign of the artist in her.
Next Tuesday I’ll go back to the main building at The Mansion and we’ll make the last illustrations for the short story, about the duck who leaves home to find love, the residents wrote last year.
Because of the pandemic and not being able to visit The Mansion regularly, it’s taken almost a year to get this far. I’d still like to print up some copies of the story with the illustrations, which was the original plan, even if it’s only a booklet of xeroxes.
