Artist big on community healing

BY PAT FARNELLI

“Community” and “healing” are words that Rachael Ely Van Tassel frequently speaks as she talks about her art.

A new artist to be featured on the Columbus Day Weekend’s Artists’ Open House Weekend in Susquehanna County, Van Tassel is an extraordinarily expressive and realistic artist, working mainly in drawings using conte sticks, who does not separate her art from her vocation as an art therapist.

Van Tassel, aMontroseAreaHigh Schoolgraduate, chose art therapy for her college studies on the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is employed as a social worker, but uses art therapy frequently as she works with a residential population of about 40 children.

Van Tassel and her husband Eric live next door to theForestLakeBaptistChurch, where they are youth group leaders and are part of the church’s praise team.

For the artists’ tour, her drawings will be shown inside the church and in a tent outside, as her home and property are being renovated and landscaped, and a fieldstone retaining wall is being built alongside her driveway and lawn by her uncle, Ken Ely.

Ely’s work at the Van Tassel home is another stop on the artists’ tour, as he has participated in the tour for years as “Good Neighbor Walls.”

Van Tassel saids that most of her work has developed into a ministry which uses art to draw upon the subject’s lives, trials and joys called hopeinart.org, which is also a website where her work can be viewed.

She spends time interviewing a participant, having a relaxed conversation about “what they have been through,” and usually, a metaphor comes to light that becomes part of the drawing. One drawing shows a woman’s hand dangling two rings on a chain over her shoulder: on the hand is a wedding band. This woman is a deeply caring soul who has been through two difficult marriages that ultimately failed, and is now in a good marriage to a man who has helped her deal with the pain of her previous relationships.

Another, of a hand holding a curved shell with a hole broken in its outer wall, portrays a breast cancer survivor. Nearby, a drawing of hands tying a knot in yarn, tells the story of aForestLakewoman who has spent her life serving others, and who makes lap quilts for the elderly and disabled.

Some pieces are obviously religious in nature, such as a closeup of a hand with an iron spike through the palm, surrounded by many other hands. Two very large pieces above the platform of theForestLakechurch show a hand grasping a communion cup, and another holding the symbolic bread of communion.

Van Tassel also works in watercolors, which are very small and monochromatic.

Van Tassel is employed inBinghamton,N.Y., as a social worker at the Children’s Home of the former Wyoming Conference, where she works with children at the residential treatment center.

She also sings and plays guitar for the praise team, and leads seminars for the church’s women’s ministries.

Van Tassel said her current project from her observation that people in her community often seem normal, “fully blessed, but then you don’t see the traumas they’ve come through.”

She hopes her ministry, centered around getting to know individuals better, will help unlock those who have learned things painful to reveal, and draw the community closer together.

Twelve completed drawings for the “Everybody Has a Story: Tell Your Story” project will be part of the show. Some commissioned pieces and other works will also be available for view.