Dr. Victoria Sonstegard is the founder and CEO of Art Speaks: Design + Illustration, creator of the Blog, Women out West: Art on the Left Coast, a fine artist, art historian, and educator. Dr. Sonstegard has designed logos and advertisements for industry and has taught drawing, painting, art history, and graphic design for 20 years. She was interviewed for and is excited to appear in an upcoming documentary film about California artist, Ina Perham, by producer and documentary filmmaker, William Lorton.
What matters most to Dr. Sonstegard is truth, loyalty, and compassion for all. She strives to be meticulous in her work in the field of accounting female artist’s lives on her Blog, and she is inspired by those artists, many largely forgotten over time-the impetus for the creation of the Blog.
In addition, Dr. Sonstegard is concerned with women’s issues, the environment, and aging. She loves to travel and has dragged her husband to art museums in every city to which they have visited, especially in her hometown of Washington, D.C. When she was a new arrival in Los Angeles,
she worked in the entertainment industry. Her most unusual task was on a television series called Sledgehammer! Dr. S had the dubious honor of being solely responsible for assisting Mr. Ray Walston (My Favorite Martian and Mr. Hand; Fast Times at Ridgemont High) with his very tight knee boots, both the taking off and the putting on, before every scene!
For the e-Conference, Dr Sonstegard will be presenting:
Aging with Attitude: Learn and Reshape your Brain!
More than just a creative outlet, the arts offer a path to greater physical, mental, and emotional wellness for senior citizens. Ongoing research looking at the visual arts suggests that participating in the arts may improve the health, well-being, and independence of older adults. The topic of this presentation is How to“Read” a painting using the Elements and Principles of Art, and Modes of Analysis guidelines. The art of understanding a painting is similar to reading a book in that the reader decodes symbols to establish meaning, uses inference and deduction to deepen understanding, and previous knowledge and experience affect their personal response. Slides presented to illustrate these strategies will culminate at the “reading” of Jan Vermeer’s Allegory of Painting or The Marriage of Arnolfini and his Bride.
Handouts are available for download. Barbara Bagan, professor of expressive arts therapy at Ottawa University in Phoenix, Arizona writes in the journal Today’s Geriatric Medicine, “Making art or even viewing art causes the brain to continue to reshape, adapt, and restructure, thus expanding the potential to increase brain reserve capacity.”
The arts promote thinking and problem-solving, creative expression, a sense of community, and feelings of well-being. According to research funded by the National Endowment for the Arts, among seniors who participated in the arts either as observers or makers, “…had higher levels of cognitive functioning and lower levels of daily physical issues. The research tends to show that the arts play a decidedly positive effect.”