When I walk past the Meer Art Room, I often find Ron Stearn, one of our hearing-impaired residents, painting a canvas at a table. Even when the creative writing class is meeting, he sits quietly, completely absorbed in the project before him. Smiling to himself with his brush in hand, he seems transported, unaware of the activity around him.
Watching Ron paint or witnessing other residents occupied with other activities, such as flower arranging, card making or assembling puzzles, reminds me of another artist separated by fame and circumstance but connected to our residents by something essential: the need to create.
American artist Helen Frankenthaler became one of the most influential abstract painters of the twentieth century. But what inspires me most is that she never stopped painting. Well into her eighties, every painting began the same way, she continued standing before the enormous blank canvas, asking herself the same question she used for inspiration throughout her life:
What if?
Behind the apparent simplicity of her work was a lifetime of curiosity, risk-taking, and experimentation. Beyond technique lies something harder to explain: the quiet mysterious impulse that nudges an artist forward.
I think about Frankenthaler traveling widely, absorbing landscapes, light and color. Those places rarely appeared as literal scenes. Instead, they became feelings flowing across her canvases in luminous blues, soft pinks, earthy ochres, and unexpected greens.
Through joyful seasons and difficult ones, changing artistic fashions, and the inevitable passage of time, Frankenthaler kept creating. Perhaps that is her greatest legacy… not simply the beauty of her work, but that she never stopped making it.
I think about that legacy when I’m at Jewish Senior Life. Of course, our residents are not trying to become famous artists, and they probably would laugh at the idea. But some are picking up a paintbrush for the very first time in their eighties or nineties. And others are rediscovering creativity after decades spent raising families, building careers, and caring for those they loved. I see something in them that Helen Frankenthaler would surely recognize: the willingness to begin. Every blank canvas asks for a little courage. Every brushstroke says, “I’m still curious” Every new color whispers, “I still have something to discover.”
Science now confirms what artists have long understood: creative activity supports brain health, reduces stress, strengthens memory, and even encourages the brain to form new neural pathways, even into older age. Yet we hardly need research to recognize what we witness every day.
Sit quietly. Watch someone search carefully for just the right shade of blue. Notice the quiet smile when color spreads across the canvas in an unexpected way. Listen to friends encouraging one another, not because the work is perfect, but because it belongs to them. Something meaningful is happening there, and it has very little to do with the finished work.
I’ve come to believe that creativity is healing, not because it distracts us from grief, pain, or loneliness, but because, for a time, it allows us to step outside those burdens. Painting, writing, music, dance, collage making, and embroidery remind us that our hands can still make something new, that we can still be surprised, and that beauty remains something we can both create and share.
At Jewish Senior Life, we see something quite different from the old stereotype that aging means narrowing or weakening. Lives continue to expand and blossom. Stories are still unfolding. People discover parts of themselves they thought were long gone, or had never known before.
When I pass the Meer Art Room and see Ron smiling over another canvas, I’m reminded that creativity doesn’t go into retirement. There is always another blank canvas. Another story to be told. Another song waiting to be sung.
The masterpiece of a life isn’t finished until we choose to put down the brush, the pen, or whatever other creative tool calls to us. Until then, every sunrise offers a new blank canvas.
The only question is: What will we create today?
Shabbat Shalom