AARP has recently featured the article, Find Your Inner Genius: Late-blooming artists reveal how they tapped their creative talents – and how you can too.  Find out how these adults turned to art later in life including Mack Orr a.k.a. Daddy Mack, who picked up the guitar at 45 to become a blues guitarist, or abstract painter, Audrey Phillips, 54, who turned to art after her mother’s murder and now is an award-winning artist.  Read the Online Article  and the Digital Edition.

As a follow up to the article, AARP also featured a video highlighting Gay Hanna, PhD, MFA, exploring creativity and aging.  Watch the video now!

Ready to find a program that sparks your creativity?  Check out some quick tips.

We are Richard and Alice Matzkin, a loving husband and wife age 67 and 70.  As we entered middle age, we became disturbed by the increasing signs of aging we were experiencing – wrinkles, bulges, grey hair, etc.  Being artists – Alice is a painter, Richard is a sculptor – we began using our art as a way to explore and work through our emotional turmoil, and negative views we held about aging.  After 15 years, we have produced an impressive body of work, and a beautiful multiple award winning art/inspirational book, THE ART OF AGING, Celebrating the Authentic Aging Self (Sentient Publications, June, 2009).  Most important, this work has helped us come to a sense of peace and appreciation of our aging process.

Through various art projects related to aging, we have explored essential issues about growing older, such as …looking beyond the surface and discovering inner beauty in an older face … joys and advantages of mature love and relationships ... finding acceptance of the changes taking place in our aging bodies … coming to peace with parents in their old age and death. These art projects, writings, and interviews with elders who are living their lives with passion and zest,  have helped us discover that aging can be a time of ripening and harvest rather than stagnation and despair.  

Especially in our age-conscious society, “old” brings up fear and judgment.  While we don’t minimize the challenges of growing old, we have found our present moment to be among the best of our lives.  Age has given us a wider perspective, a deeper understanding of the meaning of our lives, a gratefulness and appreciation of the preciousness of “now”.  This has come about primarily because, instead of trying to hide or deny the ongoing effects of time on our body and mind, we have attempted to consciously and joyfully embrace our aging.  This is a message of hope that people of all ages will benefit from.

BIOGRAPHIES OF ALICE AND RICHARD MATZKIN

Alice has two paintings in the permanent collection of the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.  Her commissioned portrait of Chelsea Clinton hung in the White House during the Clinton administration, an entire collection of her work was featured in the national magazine, Ms, a video about her work was shown at the United Nations during the 1999 International Year of Older Persons, and she appeared with her art and speaking about aging gracefully on the Oprah Winfrey Show.

Richard has participated in numerous one man and group shows and has pieces in collections throughout the United States.  He was key artist in a monumental equestrian piece in a train station in Ventura County.  His sculpture appeared in an art/inspirational book – The Great Age – a UNESCO publication. He is a former therapist, men’s group leader, adjunct instructor in California Community College system, and program director of a psychiatric hospital.  He holds a Masters Degree in Psychology.  He is also an accomplished jazz drummer.

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Dr. Robert Butler, who has often been referred to as 'the father of geriatrics,' died Sunday in Manhattan at the age of 83 of Leukemia.  Dr. Butler was the founding director of the National Institute on Aging at the National Institutes of Health and helped start the American Association for Geriatric Psychiatry, the Alzheimer's Disease Association and the International Longevity Center.  Despite a difficult upbringing by his grandparents, he saw the resilience of his aging grandmother as she raised him throughout the Depression.  "What I remember even more than the hardships of those year was my grandmother's triumphant spirit and determination," wrote Butler.  "Experiencing at first hand an older person's struggle to survive, I was myself helped to survive as well."

Dr. Butler has written numerous articles and books, including "Why Survive? Being Old in America," which linked psychoanalyst Erik Erikson's theory of life cycle to the process of aging.  He encouraged older adults to reminisce, something gerontologists previously viewed as being unhealthy.  Dr. Butler challenged this idea and described reminiscence, working out issues from one's past, present, and future, as an important activity and central to integrating one's life.  Because of this work, senior centers began developing reminiscence models often embracing arts programming as essential to the reminiscence process. 

Dr. Butler also stressed the importance of staying positive, finding purpose and laughter.  "We discovered in studies we did at the National Institutes of Health in the 1950s and 60s that people [who] have something purposive in life, something to get up for in the morning, something that makes a difference, tend to live longer, and better," said Dr. Butler. 

New York Times Obituary

CNN  

Naseem Miller recently finished a wonderful documentary, "Beyond Bingo," about the ways art programs can improve the quality of life of older adults providing them with sense of mastery, a reduction of stress, a way to socialize while also increasing brain fitness.  The video features Dr. Majid Fotuhi, Director of Center for Memory and Brain Health, LifeBridge Health Brain and Spine Institute, Department of Neurology, Sinai Hospital of Baltimore; clinical instructor at Harvard Medical School, assistant professor of neurology at John Hopkins University School of Medicine; Janine Tursini, Executive Director of Arts for the Aging; Dr. Gay Hanna, Executive Director, NCCA; and Lili-Charlotte "Lolo" Sarnoff, Founder of Arts for the Aging.

The video is also posted on the blog, The Arts and Health Project - A blog about art therapy and the role of arts in health care.