For one woman, patients at Miller Children’s Hospital aren’t sick kids killing time, but real artists creating real art

PHOTO by RUSS ROCA

For 90 minutes I’ve been watching Eric paint a mask. When he began, the rigid cardboard face was white and unmarked; now, it’s a rich, dark red. He has left only the eyes white, fixing them with stark black pupils and heavy black brows, which—paired with the expressionless mouth—are reminiscent of the stylized faces painted on the walls of the tombs in Egypt. With silver paint, a stencil and extreme care, he paints delicate floral flourishes on both cheeks. But, the final artistic element is the most striking: Six black exclamation points fan across the forehead, thick, squared at the top and at least an inch high.

He has worked deliberately and with great concentration, but not once has he hesitated or appeared to mull over his direction. When he arrived almost two hours ago, he simply picked up a white mask, reached for red paint and began.

When he finishes, he turns to the artist sitting next to him and says, “See, I had a lot of pain in my body, so I chose red.”

Once a week, the second-floor activity room of Miller Children’s Hospital West fills with sick children and becomes what must be the happiest place in the hospital. Patients in flapping hospital gowns pad in on stocking feet. They range in age from 2 to 20, and some pull beeping IVs behind them. They come to participate in workshops conceived, supplied and led by Denise Clayton-Leonard, the hospital’s artist-in-residence. All the children are ill, with conditions both emergent and chronic—broken bones, sickle cell anemia, exotic cancers, HIV/AIDs—and the prognoses are just as varied. Most are accompanied by parents who have been driven to obvious distraction by worry and exhaustion. And the kids themselves are often in great pain.

But they are kids. And before long, the activity room is suffused with a blessed goofiness: Boys jockey for a turn at the Sony PlayStation, crowing at every change in score; little girls hold remarkably serious and diplomatic conversations about which shade of pink paint looks best with red; and small children just a year out of toddlerhood hop and sing to Justin Timberlake or knock over everything as they reach for the stickers, sequins and glue sticks covering the worktables. It’s mayhem.

A boy about 14 comes in, surveys the scene and nudges the arm of a little girl painting her own mask.

“So, we can make a mess?” he asks.

She assures him firmly: “You can make any kind of mess.”

Clayton-Leonard’s Artful Healing program is predicated on an understanding that artistic expression can and should be a critical component of healing. This isn’t mere touchy-feely, New Age window dressing. It’s hard science. Studies like the one in The Journal of the American Medical Association offer definitive measurable proof of the therapeutic value of art in a hospital setting. The benefits are legion: shorter hospital stays, decreased reliance on pain medication, improvement in functional abilities and lowered blood pressure. Participation in art reduces anxiety, banishes boredom, decreases depression and helps patients feel more connected to their bodies, caregivers, fellow patients and their environment—no matter how impersonal and sterile that environment might be. It keeps the mind sharp.

Hospitalized children experience powerlessness on a particularly terrible scale: Generally excluded from decisions about their treatments, they languish in small rooms in front of daytime television, answer whatever questions their doctors ask and hope—or plead—for a reprieve from the next painful procedure, whether it’s the administration of a catheter, installation of a shunt or a simple (but, to a kid, painful: needles) blood test. For them, art may be the only way to process and express the totality of their experience with pain and illness. To that end, simple distraction and the opportunity to focus on abstract yet tactile experiences—marveling at the glossy ribbon of color made by the swipe of a paintbrush or the satisfying sound and feeling of scissors biting into thick construction paper—can be extraordinarily powerful.

“There’s always the kid who is in so much pain that he can hardly breathe,” says Clayton-Leonard. “You know him the minute he comes in. And the only reason he’s there is because someone said, ‘Come on, why don’t you get out, you’ll feel better.’ And he gets into the chair . . . . ” She shakes her head and clenches her fists. “And he can hardly sit. And then I come in and overwhelm him with choices. But the next thing you know, three hours have passed, and there is no pain. He’s just been having fun and relaxing, maybe even moving a bit, listening to music. And then I say, ‘Okay, we have to close up now.’ ”

Clayton-Leonard pauses and exhales. “And then you see that pain come right back.”

A child who can spend hours constructing a mobile and then hang it on her IV rack—flowers, moons and hearts swaying amidst the bags of Cytoxan, Hydroxyurea and Leukine—is a child with some control over her world. The hospital environment is not so unyielding and obliterating that she can’t make her own impression upon it.

Clayton-Leonard has been aN artist in her own right for 25 years. “But this,” she says of her work with sick children, “is my calling.” She has been involved in community outreach, in one form or another, for most of her career: When her son was in third grade, she began holding a yearly art workshop at his school. Then, she signed up as a docent at the Long Beach Museum of Art. She was such an enthusiastic and effective volunteer that she was eventually hired as the Community Outreach Artist. “I’d go out into the community, getting all of the materials, coming up with the ideas, taking them to the people, having them have a ball, and then I’d bring it all home. Now I do that for the hospital, the only difference being that when I bring materials home at the end of the day, I wipe down and sterilize everything.”

Clayton-Leonard’s work with Long Beach Memorial and Miller Children’s Hospital began in 2000, and since then the Artful Healing program has achieved an impressive scope: The hospital estimates that 660 children participate in the program each year. The resulting pieces are displayed regularly throughout the city—most recently at local public libraries—and there are regular exhibitions of the entire collection. Fundraising dovetails with the goal of encouraging children to proudly showcase their work: Clayton-Leonard organizes the production of a yearly desk calendar and the sale of holiday cards printed with gorgeous reproductions of participants’ works. Of critical importance to the program—and a particular point of pride for Clayton-Leonard—is the sophistication of the media made available to the patients at Miller Children’s Hospital. Participants do not spend hours gluing dyed macaroni to construction paper, week after week. Instead, they explore sculpture, painting, metal embossing, collage, photography, portraiture—you name it.

Providing a breadth of artistic experience is a crucial goal for Clayton-Leonard, for one reason: To her, these are not sick children killing time, but real artists creating real art.

Eric—the artist behind the red mask with the startling exclamation points—is about 15, heavyset and sports a crew cut. He’s gregarious and always moving, completely undeterred by his gaping hospital gown. I’ve no idea what his illness is; it doesn’t seem right to ask. But when asked to provide a caption for his mask, he writes, “I had a lot of random bleeding. My mask is [as] red as blood is. That’s why I made it red.”

The theme of this particular workshop is “What Does Your Pain Look Like?” Patients choose an unadorned cardboard mask from a large pile, and sit down to piles of stickers, stencils, paints, pens, brushes and sponges, glitter and chunky plastic jewels. Clayton-Leonard has spent hours cutting images and phrases—both innocuous and provocative—out of magazines and then color-copying them onto sticky-backed paper so the kids can easily incorporate them into their work.

Because the hospital experience is focused on waiting and expectation—When will my child get well? What will the test tell us? Will this medication work?—the prompts, which children are free to ignore, provide an important opportunity to ruminate on daily personal experiences. Some previous projects are: “Warhol and Me: Using Color to Express My Self-Image” (self-portraiture); “Body Images and HIV: How Do I Feel About My Body?” (Barbie doll collage); “Fantasy Hospital Room” (diorama); “Pill Burden” (collage with scanned photos of different medications); and “Taking Aim at the Hospital” (photography).

The resulting art is whimsical and audacious. Young children go wild with color, like budding Rothkos. Some pieces are endearingly saccharine—grade-schoolers are supposed to like puppies, hearts and rainbows. But occasionally the art is full of fury. Take, for instance, the support group for adolescents who contracted HIV in utero. Clayton-Leonard works with them regularly. They’re mature enough to imagine what a lifetime of sickness might look like, old enough to contemplate eventual physical intimacy and understand its role in shaping their adult lives. They grapple with what’s got to be extraordinary anger and seem particularly responsive to Clayton-Leonard’s most pointed assignments. Much of their work is unsparing, with exposed bodies, awkward limbs and denatured colors. One collage features a sunbathing Barbie doll with a blackened face and a severed foot, the words: “Kiss me I’m beautiful—Not Anymore” printed alongside the beach towel.

In the end, the kids say what they want to say. To most, the workshops are simply a welcome break from treatment. Some seem compelled to communicate their experiences (“My mask deals with a little pain. I have a little pain where my IV is”), and some are simply having fun (“When I look at my mask, it makes me think about rainbows. Rainbows make me feel colorful”). Whatever the output, Clayton-Leonard is clear: These children are artists, and their endeavors must be taken seriously. She marvels at each creation with unmistakable sincerity and eagerly presses small children to explain how they knew that the horse should be purple or that the rainbow should go exactly there. Every piece is solicited for display in the next show, resulting in some touching negotiations: The kids are frequently unwilling to part with their work, preferring to hang pieces in their rooms or offer them instead as gifts to parents and nurses.

Clayton-Leonard works very hard to ensure that the activity room is a place of great and inspirational plenty. And though it requires extra fundraising, she refuses to  compromise on the quality of materials. “My supply budget is kind of high. But I tell people, ‘When you are dealing with kids in the hospital, you want to buy good quality watercolor paper. Not kid-grade watercolor paper.’ Because once they start working with it, it just dissolves, and they get frustrated. You want this to be a success for them. So, we get good quality watercolors and watercolor paper, so that the first mark that they make works and gives them beautiful saturated color, and the color diffuses in the perfect way.”

On this day, every child will create at least two cardboard masks. The table is crowded with tiny pots of professional-quality acrylic paint in a multitude of colors, not just the primaries, but teal, vermillion, saffron, bronze. The paint is poured into black plastic trays in generous dollops and set before the children, who are encouraged to mix colors and ignore what they have been told are the art world’s rules. Caution—here, at least—is an adversary at last. The media notes that accompany finished pieces indicate the abundance of the workshops: “watercolor, oil pastel and tempera on paper,” “acrylic paint on plexiglass,” “acrylic paint and pencil on masonite,” “tempera and oil on presentation board,” etc.

And every piece is mounted for presentation.

“When I am doing fundraising, I’m always going on and on about how we make projects that parents can use to decorate the house!” says Clayton-Leonard. “That part never sells, and I don’t know why, because I think it’s great! Oh well. But I make sure that what they finish can be shown. I always put a little stand on the back, so it doesn’t end up on the refrigerator or in the drawer: It’s going to be displayed. We put mat boards around everything. We finish the piece. Because to me, you put art in your home, you remember the moment, and you use professional quality materials so that things will last.”

My own 3-year-old’s artistic output:

Each week of preschool ends with a new stack of 11-by-18-inch sheets of butcher paper, rumpled and stiff with dried paint, covering the refrigerator like shaggy bark. Every few days, an industrial-strength magnet will reach full capacity, and a sheaf of sponge paintings, tempera handprints and grocery lists will slide to the kitchen floor. Not having the heart to throw out the masterpieces, I return one or two favorites to the refrigerator door, and the rest find themselves in one of several guilty growing piles destined—I’m being honest here—for the garbage. I realize that childhood art is the very definition of ephemera, not least because there is so much of it. It marks the minutes and accumulates at nearly the same rate as the progress of my child’s days through school.

But that will not necessarily be true for these children or their parents.

Mounting a work of art, matting and framing it, and recording the child’s thoughts on it: All are ways to professionalize the participant’s experience and encourage him or her to take pride in his or her work. In this context—where mortality takes no vacations but works all day, every day—the art takes on a painful significance.

The activity room is a marvel. One wall, covered in enormous windows, overlooks a sunny courtyard. The other three walls are painted with a huge wraparound mural: a seascape, complete with palm trees, fishing boats and whitecaps. A piano, foosball table, enormous flat-screen television for video games and a karaoke machine fill the margins of the room. There are movies and books, piles of board games and lots of chunky Fisher-Price toys. Clayton-Leonard begins this particular workshop by opening the CD player and loading up discs: Disney music, hip-hop, French cabaret mixes and pop collections. She spins the volume up, and two little girls—both about four years old—walk in, each towing a mother. One of the girls is quite tiny—smaller than your average toddler—and seems smaller because of the painful-looking shunt in her arm. The other has a blackened drooping eye and pulls an IV festooned with Barbie cutouts, a paper lantern and a colorful mural bearing her name. The girls go straight to a big purple Playskool tabletop castle and become engrossed in exploring the contents of its many doors and windows. Their mothers, however, scan the surface of the activity table, sit down and turn exhausted faces to Clayton-Leonard. “What are we doing today?” one of them asks.

Clayton-Leonard has explained to me that art therapy benefits the entire hospital community, practitioners and caregivers, as well as patients and their parents. The next two hours make this clear. The children exhibit varying levels of concentration on their projects, but the mothers—absolutely, without exception—lose themselves completely in painting. At first, it seems as if their participation is merely an expression of good manners, as if to say, “This nice lady spent all this time putting all these art supplies together for you, and if you’re just going to play video games, then I’ll paint a mask.” But as the hours pass, it’s evident that something else is going on: The children aren’t the only ones who need a distraction.

“You’ll see the parent who has been given some news that isn’t good,” Clayton-Leonard explained earlier. “And she’s in there working with her child, but you can tell that she’s trying not to cry, and you just feel that pain. When I see that person working through that bad news . . . .” She pauses and then continues: “Sometimes I just go play foosball with the kid and tell the mom, ‘No, you work, you just work, we’re fine.’ ”

Clayton-Leonard tells me this:

“There was one girl who had been in and out. I don’t know why, but I never really ask what their diagnosis is. Anyway, she had been looking great, and the next thing I knew people said, ‘Casey’s been wanting to see you.’ So, I went in, and we did some art together, and later people said, ‘So did she tell you?’ I said ‘No, what?’ and they said, ‘She just got the news. Cancer throughout her entire body. Nothing they can do. This is it.’ I wanted to go back to see her, but by Monday, she was gone.

“A lot of these kids, they’re amazing: As soon as they know, they let go. Her last piece of art was really, really happy, and her family asked for it, because they couldn’t believe that she had done it right after hearing the news.”

More children and parents gather. A dad sits at the piano with two children—neither of them his own—and tries to teach them “Heart and Soul.” The little girl with the black eye is at the karaoke machine, singing into the microphone. Clayton-Leonard dances from child to child, singing, praising color choices, always reminding participants “there are no mistakes in art,” delivering glue dots and skipping out to fetch nurses when IVs start to beep. A pediatric surgeon comes in to inform one mother that her daughter will be discharged that afternoon and turns to reassure another mother that her son will be in good hands: He knows the oncologist in question and can vouch for him. Then, he grins from ear to ear at the little girl at the karaoke machine, clapping in time with the music. And kids get so engrossed in sharing their stories about the times they’ve accidentally ripped out IV lines they flap their arms in demonstration, almost ripping the lines out again. Clayton-Leonard and nearby parents dash forward, not to stop the conversation but simply to hold onto the racks, pushing them toward the children just a few inches, to create enough slack in the lines to enable continued storytelling.

It’s joyous, largely because Clayton-Leonard is so filled with joy herself. But though this is an inspirational studio and playroom, with reassuring, homelike clutter, it’s still a hospital. At some point, I realize I hear a child screaming down the hall—not crying, not wailing, but shrieking in either fear or pain, without words, and it goes on forever. It is a terrible, terrible sound. I look around the room, but no one else seems to hear it. Minutes go by, and I go into the hallway and follow the screams. Soon, I am standing outside the right room, biting my thumbnail, torn between respecting the privacy of whoever is inside and clawing the door down. I flag down a passing nurse—the endless screams have grown louder—and ask her to check on the child inside. She pats my arm, goes inside and then comes out to reassure me that it is a frightened toddler lying in his singing mother’s arms. She promises me he isn’t alone.

Later, I mention the incident to Clayton-Leonard. She sighs, and admits, maybe sadly, “You know, I don’t hear it anymore.”

Tags: artful healing, Long Beach, long beach memorial hospital, miller children's hospital