Maria Teresa Flores of Naperville says many of her childhood memories are like paintings. She describes scenes of a sophisticated, colorful and exotic landscape framed by the windows of the family’s oceanside home in Lima, Peru. She often remained indoors while her three brothers rough-housed and played outside because her physician-father prescribed lots of rest indoors for his asthmatic daughter.
“I first picked up a paint brush when I was 6,” Flores said, “and ever since then painting has been the place I could go to look at the world.”
In a 1990s global society, the stress of being a displaced person is a common one. Whether a person moves to the western suburbs of Chicago from, say, Dallas or Lima, change is change. Flores knows about change. What’s more, as a fine artist and a professional art therapist, change, contrast and displacement are recurring themes in her art and her therapeutic work. This month she has opportunities to showcase both.
For starters, four of Flores’ paintings are currently featured along with the work of seven other artists in an exhibit at the Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture on Chicago’s South Side. Additionally, on Nov. 14 she will present a paper about art and the multicultural experience to more than a thousand professionals attending the 27th Annual Conference of the American Art Therapy Association in Philadelphia. Entitled “The Making of a Life Story Book with Latino Clients,” the paper chronicles Flores’ 600-hour master’s degree internship project at a counseling center on Chicago’s North Side.
The Balzekas exhibit, entitled “Perfection in Exile: Chicago Immigrant Art,” illustrates artistic development under the influence of physical and spiritual displacement, according to museum curator Danas Lapkus. Besides Peruvian Flores, the others, all professional artists, hail from Brazil, Canada, Cuba, Lithuania and Poland. Lapkus selected artists who came to this country as adults and had studied art in their native countries and the U.S. He said he wanted to examine how the artists interpreted the contrasts between native and adopted cultures.
As for Flores’ work as an art therapist, the profession is a relatively new kid on the counseling block, according to Suellen Semekoski, assistant professor and clinical coordinator of the master’s program of art therapy at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. It emerged, she said, from the dominance of analytic thought in the 1950s and focuses on the unconscious mental activity that occurs while drawing.
“Since we see before we speak,” Semekoski said, “visual language transcends verbal language.” This often reveals what she calls personal truth, or a person’s true feelings, that enhance one’s individual problem-solving abilities.
For example, in an after-school program, art therapy can help children learn to understand and control their emotions in a nonthreatening manner. Through art, they can find a constructive way to release emotion. In a more clinical setting, Semekoski said, art therapy resembles a kind of meditative process in which individuals deal with difficult circumstances such as terminal illness or severe mental, emotional or physical abuse. Flores’ master’s project, in which she worked with Latinos unable to synthesize their native traditions with their new American culture, is yet another use of the process.
Speaking from the kitchen of her Naperville home, Flores explained how her clients created life story books. The life story books consist of 10 chapters.
“In the first four chapters, I asked them to draw (or paint) pictures of what their childhood home was like. They would use colors and place figures in ways that we could begin just talking about,” she said.
In the next chapters, clients portrayed current feelings and situations through pictures. The life book’s final chapters, she said, consisted of drawings of how, or where, the clients want to be in the future. The pictures served as the basis for discussion, with Flores picking up on visual clues, asking questions and making notes.
By the end of the process, she said, the clients’ pictures often aided them in putting together a plan to replace what was missing from their lives in this new country.
Flores’ own home, with its blending of old and new, foreign and domestic, appears to embody a similar philosophy of merging cultures. The decor places huge potted plants, dramatic fabrics, colorful masks, Central American ceramic bells and wind chimes plus, of course, plenty of her own paintings with their kaleidoscopic use of color, in contrast to and in harmony with American modern furniture and electronics.
She admitted the issue of melding cultures is one with which she is very familiar. Although she has been living in the United States for 23 years, a little more than half her life, annual visits to family still living in Peru plus deeply embedded memories keep Flores connected to her native country. Add to that the gentle exile spent within her own childhood home, and Flores has become something of an expert on being a displaced person. She recalled that art has always been a healing activity for her.
It is precisely because she has been painting all her life that Flores believes she did not have identity problems when she moved to the U.S. Also, she credits well-educated parents for giving her a perspective on the social and political turmoil in Peru.
Semekoski said Flores brings a sensitivity to her dual professions as fine artist and professional art therapist that sets her apart.
“The art therapist must not only know the creative process, but the best art therapists are those who can relate to the therapeutic value of that process,” she said.
Before coming to the United States, Flores studied at the Suarez Vertiz Drawing Academy and the School of Art of the Catholic University of Peru at Lima. Subsequently, she received a bachelor of fine arts degree from Northern Illinois University in DeKalb. Last spring she received a master’s degree in art therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, where she was the school’s merit scholar.
She has exhibited paintings at a student exhibit at the School of the Art Institute and at the James Art Gallery in Aurora. She also worked as a Spanish teacher at St. Raphael Elementary School in Naperville. Currently she works as an art therapist in children’s counseling at Family Shelter Services, Naperville.
Flores and her husband, Luis, a professor at the Northern Illinois University school of business, have two daughters. Claudia, 21, is a senior studying philosophy at the University of Chicago, and Natalia, 14, is a freshman at Waubonsie Valley High School, Aurora.
Flores feels that although her paintings may look modern, they possess a mystique in form and imagery that is rooted in her Peruvian ancestry. The mixed-media paintings–mostly blends of acrylics, oil paints, oil sticks, watercolors, even sand and colored ink–are like windows on the interaction between two cultures. The sometimes intense clash between the ancient civilization of Peru and the modern culture of this country is another recurring theme in her work. Although Flores’ paintings are abstract, the colors and shapes often hint at animals or landscape shapes and other natural objects. Colors swirl, textures interact and shapes balloon and recede.
“I wake up in the morning with colors and shapes in mind. I may not know what the final painting will be, but I know the mood of it,” Flores said of the artistic process. She paints every day for two to three hours in her home studio, completing somewhere around two dozen paintings in a year. All are approximately the same size, 30 inches by 44 inches, and they sell for around $1,000.
Some, Flores said, will never be for sale because they represent some of her deepest feelings about both of her environments.
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“Perfection in Exile: Chicago Immigrant Art” at Balzekas Museum of Lithuanian Culture, 6500 S. Pulaski Rd., Chicago, remains on exhibit through Nov. 11. The museum is open 10 a.m.-4 p.m. daily.
