Our Director’s Backstory

Twenty five years ago, my teaching career was interrupted by trauma and serious illness. As part of my recovery, I developed what I would eventually name Bodyscapes  out of my personal need to find meaning amid the disruption of my life and communicate my experience to my family.

The trauma triggered years of panic attacks and reignited the depression I lived with as a teenager. Although doctor-prescribed anti-psychotic medications seemed to help, they caused severe damage to my liver. My mental and physical health negatively impacted, I had to quit teaching high school art.

One day, a friend suggested I consult a Chinese medical doctor.  I knew instantly I had found someone who could help. I began a tailored regimen of prescribed Chinese herbs and acupuncture treatment, while carefully reducing my Western meds. One winter evening, while lying on the doctor’s acupuncture table, the anti-psychotic meds all but gone from my system, after needles had been inserted, one into the middle cartilage of  my ear, the Home of Wonderment, a strange quietude transported me to another dimension and a voice articulated a vision: “You have now been driven home—to the home of the wonderful one. It is a red and orange house sitting on a rough rock. Lily of the valley grow high to touch the bottom of the windows on the first floor. Purple lilacs grow up even higher to cover the second floor windows. The house is surrounded at the top by yellow forsythia like a crown.” Instantly, I recalled the intoxicating  fragrance of all the lily of the valley and lilacs growing in New England in the Springtime. 

This imaginative image was the start of a period of heightened creativity. About  a week later, I became aware of a crucial insight: I did not really know what my liver looked like. So,  I consulted a medical anatomy book. From the moment I saw a photo of an actual liver, my relationship to my body changed. I saw my liver as a part of myself which had done nothing wrong yet got all the blame. My liver had no words written  across it which said, “Diane is a failure as an artist, a sister---a bad daughter.” My liver was innocent, and I simply could not be mad at it any longer. 

I began to create colorful medical illustration-style pastel drawings of my sick liver. representing simultaneously the embattled parts of my physical body and my experience combating illness. Art making soothed my soul and connected me to my personal source of healing power. Once I gave form, texture, and color—outside my body—to physical pain and illness, I could see that my ailing body was not to blame. When my family would visit, we often took out my drawings. Now that my pain and illness had texture and color, my family had a language to talk about my health. I felt less alienated and alone.

Six months later, a friend living with liver cancer came to visit. Her daughter examined my drawings of my migraines and stomachaches and commented, “I’ve only ever seen a liver on my mom’s x-rays. Would you teach me to draw one so I can make a picture to help heal my mother’s liver cancer?” In that moment, I  realized I could help the girl deal with her confusion and find hope. Every day while her mother napped, my young woman friend placed her Bodyscapes drawing on her mother’s liver to help heal the cancer. Through art, LD and her mother discovered a new way to communicate about the cancer that would soon separate them. Frannie, the mother,  told me that I had found her calling.

In 2015, the Red & Orange House was awarded a grant from the Anne Goss Foundation to conduct a Bodyscapes Art Workshop for the Child Life department at Riley Hospital for Children in Indianapolis. From 2014 and 2017, we were awarded Lloyd Symington Foundation grants to conduct Bodyscapes Healing Art Workshops and art exhibits at Women’s Cancer Resource Center. in Oakland, CA In 2016, an Anne Goss Foundation grant funded us to conduct Bodyscapes Healing Art Workshops and an art exhibit for teens receiving dialysis treatment and the Child Life Department staff at Arkansas Children’s Hospital in Little Rock. In 2018, the Red & Orange House brought Bodyscapes Experiences to long-term survivors of the AIDS epidemic. One project was funded by The Elizabeth Taylor 50-Plus Network, a program of the San Francisco AIDS Foundation.