Healing Journey

Awakenings group nurtures, provides reason to live for artists with mental illness

Painting is Kurt Taecker’s means of survival.

Since diagnosis of mental illness at age 17, Taecker has been compelled to create artwork. Driven, he grasps a brush, oozing with oil paint. Feverishly he works the canvas until it speaks of the twists and turns in his mind. And beyond.

Then his fingers smear and scrape the buttery, brilliantly hues. Throughout the process, Taecker says, is a sense of healing, a momentary lessening of anguish. So he continues.

“The main thing is I’m still here today,” says Taecker, 45. “But when I was not doing as well I was painting a lot more. You get more into the canvas and leave those feelings behind. Then not only do you have a canvas, you have at least temporarily alleviated those feelings. It is real calming. It puts something where something else is lost or is hurt.”

Fellow survivors invited Taecker to become a member of the Awakenings Project, a non-profit group of Chicago area artists will mental illness. The group aims to raise public awareness of the creative talents of people living with mental illness, to enhance and promote those talents.

Since Awakenings was spearheaded in 1997 by Glen Ellyn resident Bob Lundin, co-director, about 60 area artists with mental illness, or ³consumers,² have joined. He hopes Awakenings will someday grow to encompass all mentally ill artists.

Every kind of art brings healing, says Awakenings co-director Irene O’Neill-Sam of Naperville. O’Neill-Sam, who was diagnosed as bi-polar, is a visual artist and writer who’s also performed Latin, African and Caribbean percussion professionally.

“It (music) even gets to me on a more gut level than visual art sometimes,” says O’Neill-Sam. “When I start to sing sometimes my voice cracks. It is so emotional. When you get past that it’s really healing. It lets the emotion out.”

But while the arts are therapeutic, O’Neill-Sam says, not all artists with mental illness are ready to participate in Awakenings public exhibits.

“We still have some artists that don’t want their names used,” Lundin agrees. “We talk about coming out of the closet just like gays. It’s not that they haven’t come to terms with their mental illness; it’s their families. It’s very difficult on families. My parents had a terrible time with it. My pain was their pain.”

People who aren’t able to survive on their own with counseling and medication have grim prospects, Taecker says.

“They either go back (to the psychiatric) ward or they kill themselves,” Taecker says.

For 12 years Lundin says he was so ill he couldn’t hold a job. During a bout in the hospital he was placed on a new medication that finally helped quell his severe bi-polar symptoms. So began Lundin’s road to recovery. He landed work as a freelance journalist (for the Chicago Tribune) because he showed editors samples of his work, overcoming yet one more obstacle.

Job hunters, Lundin points out, are typically judged on employment history rather than what they can do. “Guess what: People with mental illness have huge gaps in their resumes,” Lundin says.

Eventually, Lundin, 42, was hired for his first full time position -- research associate and editor at the University of Chicago Center for Psychiatric Rehabilitation.

Similarly O’Neill-Sam took 13 years to earn a degree in computer science. Upon graduation she was hired by Lucent Technologies, a position she has held for 16 years. In 1995, she founded Four Corners Artists Ltd. in Naperville with three local artists.

Lundin says the mentally ill, like himself, want to contribute to the community. So a goal of Awakenings is to help build such self esteem in members.

“There’s vocational benefits,” Lundin says. “They (Awakenings members) start to think of themselves as someone who’s not just collecting Social Security, but see themselves as artists. People with mental illness are often portrayed as terrible, dangerous, perverted and thatıs just not the case. We’re mentally ill and people aren’t calling us psychos, and, in a certain way, that’s extraordinary.”

Because he believes so much in Awakenings, Taecker recently agreed to let NBC-TV Channel 5 videotape him as he painted to promote an exhibit.

Awakenings helps fill a gap in members’ lives, Lundin says.

“Mental illness disrupts the ability to socialize,” Lundin says. “You may have weeks, months when you’re better, then a month in the hospital. They (Awakenings members) understand completely what you’re going through and deal with it.”

So inside his Naperville apartment Taecker admits he worries about getting paint on his new plush carpet. Yet he continues undaunted.

Taecker removes his latest painting from a stack in his living room, leans it against the wall, propped on top of his brown leatherette couch. He stands back to look, squints hazel eyes, drags on a cigarette. Perhaps later tonight, he says, more paint layers will be added until the work becomes thickly encrusted, and finally finished.

“I paint with only one eye open,” Taecker confides.

Half hidden behind an easy chair sparkles Taecker’s metallic blue bass drum from his days as percussionist in a band. Even so, the tones and rhythms engaging Taecker now come in precious tubes from art supply stores. Vivid colors compel Taecker along his artistic journey, a soothing balm for his troubled spirit.

“It is consoling,” Taecker says.

The following is a series of quotes used as captions for artwork from each artist featured in the article.

“I want to startle the person that’s looking at it or at least arouse a sense of wonderment,” says Bob Lundin of his photographs. “I mount a camera on a tripod outdoors at night in the street. All you can see is car headlights and streetlights. Then I ask the subject (usually a neighbor who&$8217s a fellow consumer) to strike a pose and stand very still. I open the shutter of the camera and take a flashlight around the subject. You see squiggles and a silhouette made of light.

“I always feel a little bit anxious,” Lundin continues. “I always worry if I have the exposures right. I don’t breath a sign of relief until I see the negatives come out right.”

“For a while I’m just putting paint on the canvas and letting it dry,” Taecker explains. “And I repeat it. I use the spatula for the first two layers. By then the picture actually turns into something. Itıs always the damn composition that is the hardest. You get an idea and as you work it changes into something else, then it changes into something else and cascades down the line until you finally develop it.

“I was experiencing some tactile hallucinations -- pains,” says Taecker, pointing to his head. “And that’s why that painting’s a little mauled over. I’ve been through hell and back a lot of times. It (painting) is psychologically to me one of the most powerful things I can do to throw out the feelings of toil and anger and things like that.

“Some people say it (the painting) looks like a pepperoni pizza. I don’t really expect people to fully appreciate the impasto unless they see it in the right kind of light.

“I go through titles in my mind but I never do formally write one on the back.”

“The oil painting shows three women in a rice field in Thailand,” says Irene O’Neill-Sam. “One of the people looks shadowy, a ghost almost. The painting was done from a photograph given to me by a fellow student who was killed ....in a car accident. It was done at a time when I did a lot of women of different cultures. I did it in her memory. That’s why it was meaningful to me.

“I really want them (the artworks) to go to a good home with people who care about them. People who are attracted to my works are usually people who feel an emotional bond with them.”

An Awakenings exhibit will be May 15 and 16 at the Illinois conference of the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill in Springfield.

Awakenings will gain nationwide exposure through an exhibit at the National Alliance for the Mentally Ill annual conference held in Chicago in July.

The Aurora Public Art Commission in downtown Aurora will host an Awakenings exhibit In September 2000.