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Newsday: COMMUNITY CHAMPIONS

2008-12-31

Pictures Bring Splashes of Hope and Healing

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Sitting for numerous hours in a dreary hospital room in the mid 1990s while visiting Will Harvey, a friend undergoing treatment for Hodgkin’s disease, Heather Buggée’s artistic impulses took hold. Buggée and Harvey, both art students, believed deep in their bones that art is a healing force. So, they reasoned, what better place to showcase the healing power of art than in a
hospital?

“The environment was very stark and depressing,” Buggée recalls. “As artists, we had a vision of what a healing environment could be, with simple use of color and visual stimuli.”

Unfortunately, Harvey succumbed to the disease, but his legacy lives on in the organization Buggée founded in 1996, Splashes of Hope. The group, composed of a small staff and 40 volunteer artists, creates customdesigned murals that transform children’s hospitals, nursing homes, AIDS clinics and more into beautiful spaces that make people feel good— in every sense of the word.

“If the purpose of the artwork is for distraction, we include a lot of hidden imagery for children to count or find,” she explains. “In waiting rooms, we usually create a more serene and calming local scene that helps take people’s minds to a pleasant memory or a vision of a brighter tomorrow.”

The murals can literally help ease the pain of patients undergoing medical treatments, according to Buggée. “Nurses, practitioners and parents have told us how important it was to have a visual focus for the child during painful but necessary medical treatment,” she says.

One of Splashes of Hope’s most recent projectswas at UnitedCerebral Palsy of Suffolk. Nearly a dozen artists spent the better part of eight days at UCP’s two childrens residences in Central Islip personalizing each room. They also painted large walllength murals in two of the common rooms at each house, including one depicting a beach and ocean scene in the sensory stimulation room.

The children, seven girls in one home and seven boys in the other, all have significant developmental disabilities and attend the UCP Suffolk Children’s Center during school days. “The murals make the rooms warmer and friendlier,” says Renee Csajko, program supervisor for children’s residences. But the benefits go beyond just beautification. “The artistic designs create stimulation, smiles and laughter, and they can also be very calming.”

Csajko describes the joy felt by one young girl who is non-verbal, non-ambulatory and, due to her physical disability, only able to lie on her back when in bed. “They put her customized window panel above her bed on the ceiling, so she can look up and see hot air balloons in the sky,” says Csajko. “The reaction in her eyes is a wonderful thing to see.”

“Art makes an environment humane,” says Buggée. “There is something life-affirming about the creation of artwork which translates into the experience of the viewer. There is an internal peace when the right design is being created.”

—Jenna Kern-Rugile