Interview with Shalene Hatton, Art Therapist
Interview – Shalene Hatton, LMFT, ATR
By Michael Towne
I recently had a chance to talk with Shalene Hatton, our Art Therapist at Benioff Children’s Hospital, San Francisco. We discussed a lot of interesting aspects of how she got into art therapy and her thoughts on the work. A central theme was how creativity helps with problem solving. Have you ever had that moment when you were drawing and it didn’t turn out the way you hoped? We probably all have. Shalene believes that moments of creative challenge are where the therapeutic work begins. When watercolor explodes out of the lines, or an ink line takes a wrong turn… Those moments when we feel unsuccessful and disappointed in our work. How many times have you heard someone say: “I am not an artist. I can’t draw!”? There are so many childhood stories where we have tried to create, and at some crucial moment something or someone suggests we don’t have that skill. Far too often creativity and the joy of creating are taught out of us, even if unwittingly.
Shalene sees part of her role as the Art Therapist as being present and supportive in those central moments. Are there new skills that can be learned? Would changing viewpoints offer more creative solutions? Would humor change everything? Shalene often facilitates art groups with unique approaches even from the beginning. Sometimes it is ‘Scribble Drawings’ when the artists start with some crazy, scribbly lines that get them beyond rigid expectations of realism from the outset. She also believes in teaching art technique as part of the process, which leads to a sense of mastery and developing skills. Shalene describes how the process of art therapy is not necessarily about what happened in the past like many other forms of therapy. Nor does it have to be about the future. It is that moment of action an artist can take when there is an opportunity to choose how to respond to the situation. This sounds much like Viktor Frankl’s famous quote: “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” Shalene also points out that through this process, the artwork can communicate back to us about who we are.
One story that Shalene told about herself was her own creative problem solving when she was a child. Often while waiting for a parent to finish work, she only had lined office paper and black and red pens as things to occupy her time. She recounts how she made many pieces of art with what was available that told stories and asked questions, and allowed her to engage her curiosity and active mind. Those early art pieces eventually gave way to painting and water colors, then developed further to illustrated books. To this day, Shalene enjoys a changing landscape of her own artwork. She loves learning new creative skills in areas outside of visual arts, such as comedy writing, dancing, video arts, and seeing how her robust creativity unfolds further with each new tool or approach. Her artwork often has themes of discovery and problem-solving; complicated and organic patterns, outerspace and under-the-sea shapes and motifs. She says she understands why a long time ago artists were often also scientists.
While there are many methods of self-discovery, inquiry in all its forms moves us through our challenges into the space of humanistic growth
