Gay Walker is an artist, art therapist, and a retired art professor at Western Michigan University. She uses art therapy with people who are ill, hospice patients and their families dealing with grief and loss, children and adults with cancer, people with Alzheimer’s Disease, and people with disabilities. Walker's current project is developing the Art of Healing Expressive Arts Program based on Walker’s workbook, The Art of Healing.
“Art therapy came into my life because I got bored after being a graphic designer for 20-some years,” Walker says. “At the same time, I was doing volunteer work at the Fetzer Institute. We were working with chronic and terminal illness, and I just launched into doing art with the kids. I didn’t even know that art therapy was a degree at that point. Someone said, ‘Why don’t you go into art therapy?’”
In her late 40s, Walker changed careers. She went to Antioch University for its individualized program. She studied art therapy from a holistic and spiritual perspective, working with people who had cancer.
“I worked for Borgess Visiting Nurse and Hospice for eight years,” Walker says. “I started an Expressive Art and Comfort Care Program. Most often, a doctor or nurse would find out if the patient had an interest in this program, and then I would get a referral.”
Finding projects that could be done in a limited amount of time and required little energy, Walker visited patients in their homes. Many of them wanted to make something they could leave behind for family and friends.
“I worked with a guy who was blind. He did 13 paintings in the time that we were together,” she says. “It was magical. We would set up the palette with different colors lined up. He would paint a tree and say, ‘Well, now am I painting green?’ And maybe he had purple. We would laugh, and it wouldn’t matter.”
From those experiences, Walker developed the workbook to guide cancer patients. When she was diagnosed with cancer herself in 1998, she turned to her own art therapy practices to help heal herself.
Later, Walker became program coordinator and professor of Integrative Holistic Health and Wellness at Western Michigan University. She developed many traveling exhibits of artwork by patients, and also taught at the Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts.
“I have used all the techniques in this booklet for myself and with many others in support groups, workshops, classes, conferences, and cancer retreats put on by Chrysalis Community, my non-profit cancer program,” Walker says. “This way of processing difficult parts of life has been an important discovery, and I want to share this gift.”
The Art of Healing Expressive Arts Program was made possible by a Freedom of Spirit Award recommended by Molly Vass and Rob Lehman and given to the Bronson Cancer Center in Kalamazoo in honor of Gay Walker. The award was established to make grants and other awards that honor and encourage the inner, spiritual freedom that is the source of human creativity, courage, and love in the world.
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