Ministry through the eye

On a December morning, inside the activity room of a Winnipeg hospital, cartoonist Lorlie Barkman sets up an easel and a handful of coloured markers. Then he begins to circulate among the patients who have assembled.

He greets them; he coaxes out bits of conversation.

“What’s your name?” “Where did you grow up?” “Did you ride a bicycle when you were young? “A horse?”

Most of the patients are in wheelchairs. Most of them are elderly. And, in spite of the cheerful Christmas decorations and the carols playing in the background, the demeanour of many of them is stolid and disengaged.

Barkman asks one woman if he may draw her riding horseback. She agrees. He starts the sketch with a cowgirl hat.

He asks what kind of hair she had. A few strokes and a touch of colour and it’s there: long, blond. He gives her a red plaid shirt.

The woman smiles as she watches herself come to life as a happy young girl chasing after a calf on horseback, an excited dog bounding beside.

As he draws, Barkman elicits details, not only from the subject of the piece but from others. He also inserts details and memories of his own, about the fact that he is colour-blind, for example, or the time his family’s dog nearly choked on a piece of farmer’s sausage.

His audience remembers too. Their horses’ names, for example: Misty Dawn, Dick, Little Prince. A second drawing, of two patients’ skating days, reminds them of home-knitted toques, double-bladed skates, and bread at “six cents a loaf and two for eleven.”

By the time Barkman finishes the session’s third and last sketch – of by-gone washdays – the participants have laughed, applauded, heard stories, told stories. One stroke of the marker after another has drawn them out.

Drawing people out. That’s the name of Barkman’s business, in fact, and his ministry passion.

He’s always loved to draw, he says, and he’s a “visual thinker.” As a boy, reading the newspaper started with the comics. He studied at Bethany Bible Institute and MB Bible College but also took art training. He worked as a church planter/pastor in Moose Jaw from 1964–75, then came to Mennonite Brethren Communications (now called Family Life Network) to pioneer a ministry in television. Over 15 years, he produced seven series (13 half-hours per series) of the successful children’s show, “The Third Story.”

Barkman recalls that media culture for children was undergoing significant changes in those years. Visual effects had taken a huge leap from Mr. Dressup to the puppet wizardry and sophistication of Sesame Street. Shows became highly segmented and fast-moving. Background music was much more distinctive and contemporary.

“The Third Story” incorporated these changes, with a Christian message.

These were exciting, challenging times. But, Barkman says, “Media is hard on you.”

In 1990, he returned to the pastorate, at Westwood Community Church, Winnipeg, where he served until 1998. Since then, he has been doing part-time work with Family Life Network, in various media endeavours, especially Connecting Points with Kids – events where he draws while someone else tells stories. He has also found a growing ministry with people in personal care homes and hospitals.

Drawing his father

This ministry grew out of the book, Remember, Dad?, which Barkman wrote and illustrated, published by Kindred Productions in 1999. When his father showed signs of memory loss, a health care worker told the family that watching a loved one lose their memory was like seeing “drapes close slowly over a window.” She encouraged them to look for and celebrate the moments, no matter how brief, when these curtains would open.

Barkman decided to draw some incidents from his father’s life. His father treasured these drawings and related well to them, even though he saw only a few before he died. Barkman continued the project by writing tender letters to his father, with illustrations that documented his – and the family’s – journey through memory loss and then death. The book opened the door to many drawing opportunities and to involvement with the Alzheimer Society.

The ministry of art Barkman now does with elderly or sometimes troubled people confirms what he learned through his father’s experience. “My primary purpose,” he says, “is to recognize that someone is there – and to draw them out for the moment.”

However fleeting, these moments are well worth it, he says. The drawings may hang in a hospital room for months and are taken home when the patient is discharged. They become discussion starters. “Families don’t always know what to say when they visit.”

Barkman is adamant that when Psalm 139 states we are created by God as “wonderfully complex,” this doesn’t mean just babies. This means everyone, no matter how old or diminished their faculties may be.

The medium he works in today may be simpler than television, but Barkman feels he is pioneering once again, through the power of art to heal and help.

Drawing is powerful because it communicates through the eye. “And,” he says, “it gives people significance.”

Barkman says that if he has any regrets from his years in television environment, years he was also active on Mennonite Brethren boards concerned with media and resources, it’s that he did not “press harder to get seminarians aware of ‘paraword’ communication” – communication, that is, that is not linear, not words on a page.

Barkman has many stories to tell of positive outcomes through visual communication. As he draws, the mind’s curtains part briefly for a person with Alzheimers. Children “get it” as a story is told and drawn. People of different generations connect. Seniors remember and delight in the lives they have lived.

—Dora Dueck