PHILADELPHIA (KYW Newsradio) — Some people who face depression, anxiety, and addiction are turning to art as their therapy, their way to cope and heal. A Chester County man who has used art that way now has his works prominently featured in a Center City hotel.
“It absolutely validated me,” said JP Weber of Berwyn. Weber is a self-taught artist who used painting to heal and rediscover himself after battling depression and substance abuse.
“I woke up to manipulation in order to recover from manipulation," he said.
"I need validation and I needed to find it. My reality was challenged. I have daughters, and I don’t know if that was the rod that kept me straight. I needed a place to express my story.”
For that, he turned to a paintbrush.
“I didn’t have words because I was talking about a space I never communicated before,” he said.
Many of Weber’s works are abstract paintings. He was surprised to hear from others that his work was pretty good.
“Then that would feed it,” he said. “That was why I painted because the world was saying no. And I was painting and I’m saying, ‘This is reflecting back at me.’ I painted it and I said it looked good, and I put it away and I do the next one. I needed validation that this was right, and it gave it to me.”
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Rachel Brandoff, Ph.D, a licensed art therapist at Thomas Jefferson University, concurred that making art can offer such validation.
“We get to see ourselves as somebody who is in control, who has the ability to make choices and decisions. Even our bad choices, we are allowed to own [them] when we are making art.”
She said some of her clients use art for gaining mastery of their life.
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“Then those skills are transferable into other parts of their life,” Brandoff said about people engaging in the growing world of art therapy.
“For some of my clients, they are using art as a way of communicating something to themselves. So sometimes, I will have clients that will look at their art and say, ‘Oh my God, I did not even realize I was thinking that or feeling this way,’ and somehow it becomes clear in the artwork. So in many cases, it’s about communicating to themselves. Even more so than to other people, the arts just becomes sort of a byproduct of the communication process.”
May is Mental Health Awareness Month. Some of Weber‘s art will be in the spotlight this month at the Hyatt Centric Hotel in Center City through the Makers Series, a series of monthly art displays featuring local artists.
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