Mark Lombard
// Founder & President of For Love & ArtMARK LOMBARD is the Founder, President, Project Manager, and Hospice Volunteer serving For Love & Art, based in Dallas, Texas. For Love & Art is a non-profit organisation dedicated to bringing the Art Experience to those with limited mobility. Their mission is to provide: “healing, rejuvenating and ‘dusting’ broken spirits – even if just for a little while – through simple human love, Art therapy, digital technology and the preternatural power of art”. Mark has been serving as a Hospice Volunteer at Lion Hospice outside Dallas since 2005, and formerly served as Director of Admissions at Temple University School of Dentistry, now the Kornberg School of Dentistry at Temple University, from 1987 to 2003.
Website: www.forloveandart.org
Photo: Mark Lombard
Interview:
Throughout history, great art has been thought to have power that flows beyond mere understanding. It nourishes and sustains the spirit, some call it “food for the soul.” Art often immerses the viewer in beauty, joy, and the magic of life. It so frequently elevates human beings beyond rational thought into a domain of awe and serenity that some call it the gateway to the eternal.
Pablo Picasso famously quipped, “Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.” Art, like chocolate, is incredibly delicious. Art, like chocolate, doesn’t require you to know anything about it in order for it to taste so good. All that’s required is that you actively taste it and not just passively look at it.
As a hospice volunteer, I had a wonderful patient named Miss Billie who shared my passion for art. One day, Miss Billie’s legs started giving out, and specific exercises were suggested in order to restore her strength. Any reluctance she had to do so disappeared when I promised to take her to a local museum as a reward for her efforts. But try as she might, she could not surmount the toll of her years; she was not to walk again. Undaunted, I started bringing pieces of the museum to her— souvenir postcards—and I noticed her reaction when I presented these to her. Why, she was young again! How her eyes twinkled as she relished the treasure before her. In the moment, she had recaptured beauty and life with vigor!
One painting in particular made a striking impression on her. Painted from a distance, William Merritt Chase’s “Idle Hours” depicts a family scene at the turn of the century enjoying a picnic in a grassy field beside a lake. Miss Billie looked at this, and pointed with her finger to the person closest to the lake and declared, “I wish I was right there, right now!” And she was! She was no longer in that nursing home in Grand Prairie, Texas, no longer in her cramped room, no longer worried about what’s for lunch, or when her family would visit, or how her hair looked. She was free, liberated from the ugliness of everyday life, quietly idling away the hours with her family along a lakeside on a cool summer day.
Such is the art experience made real. One reclaims beauty, youth, freedom, and vigor, even if just for a little while. It’s possible! Like chocolate, you have to taste art in order to get its magic. Clear your mind, step out of the world of judgment and opinion and what you know or don’t know, and what you feel. Prepare yourself to launch into a voyage of discovery by asking, “I wonder what this painting tastes like?” There’s nothing to it… just taste! Court the art experience by visiting your local museums and perhaps you will develop a passion that you didn’t know you had. And take a friend. Art, like chocolate, is best when shared!
“Art, like chocolate, is best when shared!”
– Mark Lombard, Founder & President of For Love & Art
