94-year-old Los Angeles Muralist: Erma Winfield Paints the Seasons of Her Life - latimes.com

Erma Winfield is a self-taught artist who celebrates life with paintings based on photos and her memories. She spent eight months completing the mural at her home. “It turned out great,” a neighbor says.

Neighbors encouraged Erma Winfield's at-home project, and even the police hovered overhead to monitor her artistic progress.

The mural outside Erma Winfield's Mid-City home has a Grandma Moses look to it. And not just because the artist who painted it is 94, either.

The artwork stretches across a 40-foot fence and depicts the four seasons in a linear, primitive folk-art style that captures scenes from Winfield's past, just as Grandma Moses' work did when she took up painting in her 70s.

Like Moses, Winfield was raised on a farm and is a self-taught artist whose paintings are based on photos as well as her own memory.

And like Moses, she paints on unexpected surfaces: Moses favored cardboard, and Winfield used corrugated fiberglass panels as her canvas.

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Blind violinist trapped in Haiti's rubble retreats to musical memories

Image by Daquella manera via Flickr

from the Miami Herald

Somewhere in the dust and blood of his own grave, blind violinist Romel Joseph began to play the strains of Tchaikovsky's violin concerto.

Even with his left leg pinned in the rubble of his collapsed music school, he moved onto Brahms and then Mozart.

By the time he was pulled from the ruins of the New Victorian School 18 hours later, he had recited every concerto in his mind that he had ever performed during his renowned career.

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Creative Aging | ChangingAging.org

by Dr. Bill Thomas

The link between aging and creativity is subtle and indistinct in both directions and with reference to a wide variety of disciplines.

A few outstanding differences are summarized here.

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'Inside/Out': Riveting Tales of Disabilities -- Firsthand

By Nelson Pressley Special to The Washington Post Monday, June 30, 2008; Page C04 Compelling true stories were promised and delivered in "Inside/Out . . . Voices From the Disability Community," presented over the weekend at the Kennedy Center's Family Theater by VSA Arts. The show, part of writer-director Ping Chong's "Undesirable Elements" series, used a recital format (chairs, scripts, microphones) to fine effect as seven people wove their tales into a riveting chronology.