Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness
by Bambi Weavil
Brushes With Life: Art, Artists and Mental Illness
Brushes With Life features eight artists who live with mental illness, who deserve to be recognized as creative talents in a world that often stigmatizes, judges, incarcerates because of lack of understanding of mental illnesses and abuses them.
“So many people want to throw us away, and that really pisses me off,” one artist Rhonda said. The film focuses on the artists featured in the Brushes with Life STEP Art Gallery at the University North Carolina Hospital at Chapel Hill from all walks of life, with different mental challenges with different artistic talents including paintings, poetry, photographs, collages and more.
[Artist Kwami]
Many credit their ability to survive and heal from their mental illness to their ability to create art, even more than their medication. Directed by filmmaker Philip Brubaker, who also discloses his own battles with Bipolar disorder while creating this film and effectively showcases the talents of the artists while also being able to explain clinically the different mental illnesses.
This documentary is also one of the first to utilize rights free music from recording artist Moby, ad has several tracks in the film from Mobygratis.com. The site was created by the musician for low budget filmmakers who struggle to find inexpensive music for their documentaries.
Clearly the staff at UNC Hospital at Chapel Hill care about their work and believe in their programs. It’s refreshing to see these artists treated with care and respect within the system.
Brushes With Life is a celebration of creativity and the spirit that refuses to be denied in all artists, in all people, no matter the difficult circumstances. This documentary treats these artists in the way they deserve to be treated – acknowledging their stories and their amazing art, in their own voices. The focus of the documentary shows the amazing talent in these North Carolina artists, as well as threading the beginning with how some of the most celebrated artists in our history have had also brushes with mental illness such as Edgar Alan Poe, Sylvia Plath, Van Gogh and more.
I hope these artists continue with their amazing talents and I’m glad Brushes With Life paints a positive and hopeful light to mental illnesses that is viewed in such silence and judgments.
Film Screening at FedEx Global Education Center (corner of Pittsboro and McCauley Streets), Chapel Hill, NC: September 18, 2008 at 5:30 with Discussion with Filmmaker Philip Brubaker; UNC School of Medicine Dept. of Psych. Chair, Dr. David Rubinow; Founder of the Lucy Daniels Foundation, Dr. Lucy Daniels; Expressive Arts Therapist, Tina Siragusa; and Film Producer, Deirde Imershein Haj.
Art Exhibition: September 17-21, 2008; October 16-November 16, 2008
More Information: http://www.global.unc.edu/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=680&Itemid=94
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