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life drawing for everyone in the dementia community
People living with dementia and their carers can easily become marginalized,
lacking creative outlets or means of individual expression. Drawing life provides
access to the arts and space for social interaction.

Life drawing improves the wellbeing of participants and in turn combats stigmas associated with dementia, raising awareness to the wider public.

Picasso said it took him a lifetime to learn to paint like a child and Drawing Life puts this typically paradoxical statement to the test.  We offer people with nearly a lifetime behind them the chance to respond to a life model with a stick of charcoal and a piece of paper.  People who may or may not have done drawing before express themselves in new and surprising ways.

The drawings reveal something fascinating about life and memory to the artists themselves, they offer carers new subjects to talk about with those who may have lost the art of conversation and they show how people living with dementia want to preserve their identity with their own still relevant viewpoint.

 

Judy Parkinson is the project director and she has a special interest in art and memory both as an artist and an author. She has spent many an hour at life drawing classes and she is the is the author of the best selling book about mnemonics “I Before E, Except After C, easy ways to remember stuff”.