Transcription of Sally Loughridge for the show Art & The American Cancer Society, #94
Lisa: We’re back to Dr. Lisa radio hour. We like to think about health and wellness from a broader perspective and we brought in to help us think about this multiple artists over time who also think about health and wellness from a broader perspective. Today we have with us Sally Loughridge who is not only an artist but also has a background in psychology and a PhD in psychology. She is a breast cancer survivor who used her art to help her heal. Thank you for coming in and talking with us today Sally.
Sally: I’m happy to be here.
Lisa: Sally I have your book Rad Art in my hands. This is published by the American Cancer Society and it is beautiful. It contains paintings that you did while you were going through your cancer treatment.
Sally: That’s correct.
Lisa: Talk to me about this. Why was it so important for you to have this artistic outlet that you engaged in while you were going through this very medically oriented epic in your life?
Sally: I liked how you put it, an epic because it certainly was an epic in the journey and perhaps I’m still on it. Art has always been a very emotional and aesthetic process for me. It helps me connect with nature. It helps me connect with myself internally go deeper inside and understand more about myself and even surprise myself sometimes. Because I’ve been doing art here in Maine for so many years it was quite natural to think about painting my way through having cancer.
Lisa: Well actually I was going to say before you were an artist you’re a psychologist but really you’ve always been an artist.
Sally: That’s right I grew up with parents that always encouraged us to be creative, imaginative, to look for answers, to ask questions. My mother was a science teacher and very artistic herself. We were expected to make our own clothes. We entered art contests and each of my two sisters and I we each won our own sewing machine. It was sometimes like a sweatshop with all these sewing machines sitting there and we’re turning down our clothes.
It was very helpful to me in the sense of helping me believe in myself and that I could create things and do things and figure things out. I’ve always drawn and painted from as long as I can remember. I did not go to art school. I went to grad school and became a clinical psychologist. Even when I had a very busy practice in Vermont, I was painting. I’d come home from work and I’d paint. I had a show every year and that helped set a goal, that set a goal for me.
When I moved to Maine in 1999 with my husband or soon to be husband because there wasn’t licensing reciprocity for psychology between Vermont and Maine I decided to concentrate on my love of art and I’m very glad that I did.
Lisa: Why did you make that initial decision to go to graduate school in psychology and become a psychologist?
Sally: Actually I wanted to be a philosopher but I decided that that might be impractical. I didn’t envision myself teaching philosophy. Midway through college I switched from philosophy to psychology. I became fascinated by learning about human nature and I’ve always been drawn to children so when I went into my clinical work I did a lot of work with children and families. I saw adults as well but it really was the work with the kids that excited me. I also painted and drew with them or more accurately tried to help them use art, storytelling, puppet play, toys, other means of communication to express how they were feeling. It really was a bridge to them and to trust.
Lisa: Do you think that this is something that happens to us over time is that we maybe are more open as children to doing things like painting and engaging in artwork. Then as we get older if we haven’t, I’m putting quotes around this word “chosen” to be artists then we just decide it’s not that important anymore.
Sally: I think that’s right and I didn’t fully answer your question before I go back to that but I do know from research that’s been done and that kids say beneath roughly the age of 10, they are far less critical of themselves. When you get into puberty and you have more of a cognitive ability and neurological ability to analyze things and you become more self-critical and I think that discourages a lot of kids from using the inherent ability they have.
I think that all people have an ability to be imaginative and creative. It doesn’t mean they’re going to produce paintings or sculpture but we have an ability to think outside the box and sometimes that gets squashed. I went to school to become a psychologist I think largely because my family was very academic. It’s kind of an expectation you would go to a good college and then go on and do something significant to contribute. I used to love school. I might have wanted to be an eternal student so I loved being in graduate school because it was a chance to learn more and ask more questions and spend hours in the library.
Lisa: How have you incorporated your interest in philosophy into your psychology practice or your art?
Sally: Interesting I haven’t thought about that until this moment so let’s see. I don’t consciously do that but I’m sure that who I am in my own sense of spiritual connection to the world influences how I paint, how I think, and how I connect with other people. I don’t have a philosopher in mind that I then try to emulate or go back to.
Lisa: You’ve described a very thought-driven sort of approach to living and yet as part of your healing, your painting pictures in which you described to me you’re trying to disconnect from your thoughts.
Sally: That’s correct. Knowing myself pretty well not totally but pretty well, I’m pretty balanced on left and right hemispheres. I also strive to be a better and better artist as I go long as a professional artist. I also teach soft pastel painting and have for maybe 11 years now. I’m always thinking about how do you express an artistic principle or a technique. Lots of thought and I knew that in this case with the diagnosis of cancer that I might overthink the situation and bury some of my feelings.
I also knew as a psychologist that expressing myself, getting some of those thoughts out or feelings out would help me kind of rebalance myself. It’s an emotional roller coaster that a lot of people go on when they have cancer or other serious disorders or diseases. I set up some rules for myself about making these paintings in order to guard against caring what the painting looked like in the end, overthinking it and barring myself from knowing how I was feeling.
Lisa: Thoughts can be very tricky because we can sort of latch on to them and use them for our comfort and yet in cancer sometimes there are no explanations. Even if you are trying to think through something you won’t necessarily get anywhere.
Sally: I think that’s true and thankfully there’s a lot more research now and a lot more help around a number of cancers. There’s also so much information out there, not all of high quality or accuracy and with the ability to Google and search the Internet I find, I’ve heard this from other people who’ve had cancer or do have cancer, that they can get overwhelmed. They can overwhelm themselves by going to too many sites and in some sense that’s dangerous.
Lisa: Well I think that is part of the ability to kind of do a Google search and get information and have that be of some comfort but then there is always this uncertainty that no matter how much information you have and how much of it is relevant to your own life there’s still this not knowing, why did I get cancer or why me or did I do something wrong or …?
Sally: I don’t struggle with those questions and I’m glad it happened to me. What I do struggle which I’m still is do I still have it or will it come back? When people ask me, “How are you Sally?” I’ll say, “Fine” but if it’s with a close friend I might say, “Fine as far as I know.” There’s always an ‘if’ now. It makes life more precious and I think it deepens how one can experience and appreciate life. Everything felt out of control when you get cancer. It’s pretty overwhelming.
I mean I certainly felt I was too young to get cancer and how could it be and all that but this was a process I had control over. I got to structure it and I got to put cancer in its place in a way. Rather than having cancer define me like here I am breast cancer, here I am an artist who happened to get breast cancer that kind of stuff.
Lisa: I’m looking at some of the paintings in your book and these are 33 paintings over time that were done over the course of your radiation treatment. The first one is very obviously a right breast. Your right breast as my right breast day one but in the end you’ve gotten to day 33 good morning and it’s a picture of a beautiful, well I don’t know. I think it’s a tree and a bush like maybe a forsythia or an apple tree I’m not sure but it’s more landscapish.
Sally: That’s right.
Lisa: It seems as though there was an evolution over time in your paintings. Did you evolve as you were thinking about the way that you were thinking about the cancer and how it impacted you?
Sally: I think when … There are paintings in this series of 33. They were daily paintings except weekends off that when something emerged that was more representational, to me it showed that I was strengthening that I wasn’t so focused on the cancer. That felt good. There’s one fairly early on called I can’t remember what day it is but Out Of My Nowhere and it’s a painting that resembles in a very quick way some of the work that I normally do. That expression out of nowhere when I looked at the painting I had done became out of my nowhere. I was happy to see that.
Lisa: As you’re simultaneously trying to get rid of the cancer cells and also keep your other cells and your whole self healthy, how did the ability to come home and paint… how did that help that process?
Sally: It helped in a number of ways not all of which I recognized until after I’d gone through the process and some time had gone by. I knew that it could be cathartic because I know that by expressing something it can become less overwhelming and less fearful. I also knew that if I did something early in the morning so I scheduled my treatments as much as possible for very early in the morning. Then I would come home and do my painting and then write a few sentences about the painting as it looked at it.
I wanted to contain it so to speak so that I’d have the remainder of the day to use for my art and my life and my family. I think that really worked that way for me. The paintings also helped me look at some of my own feelings that I wasn’t aware of. Sometimes when you’re in traumatic situations or these medical situations you experience new emotions or ones that are so intense that it can not only scare you more but make you uncertain and like not knowing yourself.
When I did each painting when I looked at it afterwards being pretty analytical and psychologically minded, I feel like I learned more about myself. There are certain ones that surprised me. Like the one in the middle, day 17.
Lisa: Well talk to me about day 17. What’s that one?
Sally: Day 17 would be the exact middle of 33 treatments and so I went into this feeling, when I went off that morning for my treatment I felt happy relatively happy because I was half way done. I had gotten through half of it. I had the surgery I had gotten through half the radiation. The discomfort and the fatigue was increasing but I only had half way to go. I thought that I would paint quite a positive picture but if you look at the picture and I’ll try to describe it it’s a mass of blue area.
I think if I read how I described it, it will make it better to imagine it. “As I lay the blue in the shape soon came to represent completed treatments. The arrow shows the way forward. It both surprises and unsettles me that the arrow appears to be bisecting a breast no doubt my own. Apparently my unconscious self aggressively grabbed hold of my brush. What does my future hold?”
After I wrote that I named this painting Back to The Future. There was a movie like that so my idea was that I could back to my regular future but I now knew certainly that my future would always have an element around cancer.
Lisa: One of the paintings that you did was done on the day of your 65th birthday.
Sally: That’s right.
Lisa: I think many of us when we were younger have the sense that life goes on and definitely nothing bad is ever going to happen to us. We’re going to work hard. We’re going to get to a certain place in our lives and then we can shift around and start finally enjoying ourselves. You’re 65 and you’re going through radiation treatment. What did that feel like to all of a sudden realize that okay my life really is finite and it’s not going to look exactly the way I thought?
Sally: Certainly as I’ve gotten older I’ve been aware that life is finite and as people I’ve cared about have died or been ill that reinforces that certainty for you but to be 65 and on a radiation table did not feel particularly good. It also was kind of amusing because when you go for radiation and this they need to do, they always ask you your birthday. They need to make sure you’re the right person on the table and that they’re going to use the right what radiation protocol for where they aim their beams.
That day I remember going in and “what’s your birthday?” I said “4/5/45.” Suddenly one of them realized that’s today. Your birthday is today so there were a lot of happy birthdays and then we went on with it but the picture that I did when I came home that morning it took me back to when I used to go to the beach in Delaware with my family. I love the beach. That’s probably why I’m here in Maine and so it’s a very cloudy day on the beach. What I wrote at the end was that I wasn’t sure if the clouds were coming in or out, again my ambivalence and uncertainty.
Lisa: Sally how can people find out more about your book Rad Art or about your artwork?
Sally: The book is published by the American Cancer Society so if you go to cancer.org and you scroll down to find the bookshop and then click on that then the book will pop up. It’s also available on many distributors online and in some bookstores. It’s also now apparently available as an eBook through the cancer society and Amazon and other places.
I don’t have one yet but it’s available. If you want to find out more about the book and the process, there’s a YouTube video of me talking about the book and that you can access by Googling Rad Art and then my name, last name, Loughridge and that should pop up among other writings and reviews of this book. As for my artwork which is the real me if you go to www.sallyloughridge.com you’ll find lots of examples.
Lisa: Sally it’s been a pleasure to spend time talking with you about your book Rad Art and also I appreciate your bringing examples of your painting into the studio because it certainly has made this all come alive for me in a very profound way. We’ve been speaking with Sally Loughridge who’s a Maine artist and author of the book Rad Art.
Sally: Thank you I really enjoyed being here and having a chance to express some of these ideas with you and my journey.
Lisa: Today in the studio I have with me Caroline Knight who is a research coordinator or the research coordinator I should say for the Pen Bay Medical Center Research Department just off the coast from us here in Maine. She’s going to talk to us about something that I suspect many people don’t even realize is going on which is medical research and cancer research in particular in the State of Maine so thanks for coming in.
Caroline: Thank you.