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The Healing Power of Paint.

Our urban residency clinic was moving to a new space that our front desk staff, nurses, and physicians had helped to design, and we were asked to oversee the art to decorate it. Combining the perspectives of a primary care physician–educator (E.T.) and an artist working with patients and families in hospital settings (B.S.M.), we brainstormed about how to select images to represent a diverse population of children, adults, and families, with many immigrants, including refugees, from all over the world. Art can be a powerful tool for healing, and we hoped the project would be a positive experience for all. Big projects require many minds. We formed an ersatz lunchtime art committee and tossed around ideas, including regions of the world, cultural concepts of home, and a mural of the natural world with a tree of life portraying our families. Eventually, we settled on a more personal (and practical!) proposal. Patients could create pictures of their face or other meaningful symbols, thereby depicting their varied ages and backgrounds. Displayed together, the faces would illustrate the human family. We primed 7 × 7–inch Masonite tiles with white paint and penciled the outline of half a face—a semicircle marking the head, an eye, a curve for the bottom of the nose, and half a mouth—to help patients get started. One patient’s face could be paired with a sibling, parent, or child, and families could be grouped together. Patients who didn’t wish to draw themselves could paint another person or turn the semicircle into a design. “Let’s just start,” we decided, trusting the final project would emerge organically. No sooner did we announce the faces project than skeptics emerged: “Patients will just scribble!” “Boys don’t like to paint!” “Adults won’t paint!” “Many of our families have so much trauma and dysfunction; why would they ever want their pictures hanging together?” Truth be told, we love skeptics. They throw down a gauntlet that inspires success. We listened, acknowledged concerns, and suggested, “Let’s see how it goes.”