Tuesday 10 March 2009

Art can have a heart part 3

More pictures done at the retirement home. This is another Christmas wrapping paper one but can be done with old magazines and Christmas cards or even newspaper. I drew an out line but sometimes they developed into there own picture.


This one could be a cat or a kangaroo.


This is one from the second world war series of colouring in pictures. Catching swans and eating them is illegal as the Queen owns all the swans so she says. They are beautiful birds and should not be caught but when people are caught up in wars they are of course staving to death and will do anything to get something to eat even if it means going to jail for it. I also feel wars should be made illegal and owning birds and animals should be illegal and having a royal family should be illegal and going to jail for stealing food should be illegal and shipping food around the world should be illegal and fishing with lead weights should be illegal because it kills the swans as they swollen little pebbles from the bottom of the river and in that swallow lead weights from fisherman. I found a dead swan when I was a child and it had electric burn lines straight across it. So over head power lines should be ilegal and Nuclear power stations should be illegal as they spill out hot water which boils the fish and sea life as well as many other things they do. Bring back pedal power.


A crab supper, again Christmas wrapping paper picture. I did a little personal survey at the retirement home and asked everyone what there favourite dish was and they all said crabs. Norfolk is famous for crab. But the population of course is depleting as they fish them out of season so there is no time for them to breed again. Is this due to foreign factory ships scooping up the ocean beds. It must be because local fisherman known when the right time to catch the poor unfortunate creatures.


Flower arranging. Another activities that is a favourite. These plastic flowers were all donated to the home for the Lady's to arrange. Real flowers would have been nicer but health and safety say there not good as there is different natural chemicals in each real flower. When you go down the road of health and safety your left with nothing left on the planet.


Doves colouring drawing. Coloured in by a lady who let me know what fully blown epilepsy is like, not very nice at all.
Her mind was trapped in the 2nd world war and she talked in every detail of the bullets killing her friends at the factory she worked at. Not one piece of information was left out the whole war period was grafted onto her memory. So I tried to help her escape with art.
I wonder if there will be a period in time when people don't have to have a memory of war. I certainly have memory's of war that will never go away. Growing up in Ireland the news was a constant spill of war. When I got a to about 8 years old I refused to watch or listen to it. It made me feel sick. When visiting Northern Ireland on a mothers Union shopping trip I got caught up in the war and had to run across a road of an inch of broken glass and firing of army and men to get back to my bus home. I hid in a little book shop for a bit to get my breath back. The whole place was completely ridiculous every shop I had my bag checked before entering the shop and every street had a road block again to be checked. Even the bus was checked on the way into the city. To live that everyday for an entire life time would send me bananas and maybe I would say that dementia in the elderly may have something to do with having to live with a war.
Please stop all the wars they cause so much pain and suffering that we cant cope anymore.




The last in the series of activities for retirement homes and dementia. I do have a whole list of more activities that I did at the home I was at, but they have photos of people in and due to the respect of the family members I have not put any recognisable photos on my blog.



1 comment:

Larry Buttrose said...

I love the cat image (I vote it is that, not a roo) and the swans one is very touching. Amazing work. And you are right, it will be us one day (sooner than any of us would care to think too!) Lx