For some artists, it might be the kind of verdict that could stop them in their tracks.
Cancer.
But Guillermo Cuellar has used his struggle with cancer over the past three years as an opportunity to explore, through his art, the range of emotions he’s experienced, and also to accept his condition and to find joy and meaning in his day-to-day existence.
Cuellar is a Sunderland painter who has worked for years as a psychotherapist and a leadership and personal/professional coach. In the past three years, he says, creating art has actually given him a greater sense of self-awareness and understanding, particularly when it comes to trusting his instincts.
“Making art allows us to gain a new layer of knowledge through the unconscious,” Cuellar said in a recent interview.
The work he’s created in the last few years is now part of an exhibition, “Yes — Life is Art,” at Leverett Crafts and Arts that opens Saturday with a reception from 4 to 6 p.m. The show runs through Aug. 27.
The 40-plus pieces, including oil paintings, smaller works of watercolor and pen and ink, and some photographs, record what Cuellar, who’s 70, calls the four “rounds” he’s gone through since his cancer, in his abdomen, was diagnosed in May 2013.
He’s dealt with what’s known as solitary fibrous tumors — some malignant, others benign — that have occurred in different parts of his abdomen in connective tissue between muscle and bone. It’s a rare form of the disease for which there’s relatively little protocol in terms of treatment, he said.
As a consequence, he says, he’s worked with some of his doctors to try different methods of treatment, including radiation.
At the moment, he’s in recovery, he says, with his next visit to his oncologists scheduled for the fall — and though doctors once told him he was not likely even to be alive at this point, right now, he said, “I feel great, and my energy’s good.”
There’s one reason in particular for that, he believes: “Art gave me life.”
Originally from Bogota, Colombia, Cuellar grew up in an artistic family and worked as a freelance photographer. After moving in 1991 to the United States, he earned advanced degrees in counseling and organizational development (the latter at the University of Massachusetts Amherst). He has lived since the mid-1970s in the Valley, where he has practiced meditation and taught yoga.
With his wife, Dale Schwarz, also an artist, he runs the Center for Creative Consciousness in Sunderland and Leverett, which offers psychotherapy, art therapy, and organizational development; the couple works with organizations, families and individuals.
Cuellar’s exhibit also includes excerpts from his wife’s sketchbooks, chronicling her experience as spouse, caregiver and “medical concierge.”
Cuellar has painted numerous portraits over the years; his 30-inch-by-40-inch oil painting of Emily Dickinson, inspired in part by research he did in the Dickinson Museum in Amherst, has been displayed at the Jones Library in town. But when he was diagnosed with cancer, he responded to his emotions with more expressive images.
In some cases, he took dreams or feelings that were connected to what he calls his “new reality” and turned them into paintings and drawings.
For example, one drawing shows a man with large wings, with a star above his head. Cuellar explains that the art was inspired by a vision he had of removing a tumor and burning it. He imagined “smoke coming up through my head, like a chimney.
“And then I heard wings beating, this great flapping sound,” he said.
In another drawing, “The Laying of Hands,” which shows several hands grouped together on a figure’s torso, Cuellar makes reference to the totality of emotional and medical support he’s received from his wife, other family members and friends, and doctors — something he calls collecting “chi,” or energy.
“It was like feeling bathed in energy,” he said. “An amazing experience, very spiritual.”
Some images are darker. Among a series of sketches he made to document his responses to six weeks of treatment in Boston, there’s one of a human figure, the face distorted by pain and fear; it was prompted by multiple complications he experienced from chemotherapy.
In one case, his digestive system shut down for a few weeks, and he had to be given liquids and nutrients intravenously until the effects wore off.
One of Cuellar’s most vivid pieces is an oil painting he calls “A Job Well Done.” In it, a woman “rides” a bicycle down a dirt path through a bucolic landscape, with a lake and wooded shore behind her. The bike is actually a couple of feet in the air, and what appears to be a crescent-shaped parasail billows behind her.
The painting, he says, was inspired by a vivid dream in which rockets seemed to be hitting the earth without exploding. Then he found himself in a lake, unloading a shotgun. Finally, he saw the woman coming down from the sky to land her bicycle.
His interpretation? The rockets represented his radiation treatment, while the bike could be his soul’s creativity; the bicyclist herself has the face of one of his oncologists, from Massachusetts General Hospital, whom he says has been especially helpful. The bicycle’s wheels, he believes, essentially represent a person’s decision either to trust his or her intuition and take the initiative, or to take the advice of others.
“That’s been a very important issue for me during all of this,” he said, noting that he made a specific decision, against the advice of one of his doctors, to forego additional chemotherapy, a choice he believes has helped him.
Cuellar finds symbols in other examples of his work. In an oil painting of a peaceful, tree-lined shore, a filmy sun above the water “represents my wish for my cancer to go away.”
On a trip he made with his wife to southern Spain last fall, he discovered some 1,200-year-old olive trees, which he documented with photographs. The trees’ longevity, he says, gave him both hope and a sense of serenity.
Overall, he finds that his art has helped him accept and address his diagnosis and treatment. The intent of his exhibit, he adds, is to expand upon that idea and open up the conversation about using art to address difficult situations.
“I do feel that cancer has opened me into a new way of looking at life,” Cuellar wrote in a follow-up email. “I am grateful for that.”
Steve Pfarrer can be reached at spfarrer@gazettenet.com.
Guillermo Cuellar’s “Yes — Life is Art” opens with an artist’s reception Saturday from 4 to 6 p.m. and will remain on view through Aug. 27 in the Barnes Gallery at Leverett Crafts and Arts, 13 Montague Road in Leverett Center.
Gallery hours are Wednesdays through Fridays from 1 to 6 p.m. and Saturdays and Sundays from 2 to 6 p.m.
A talk with the artist will take place Aug. 27 from 4 to 6 p.m.
For information, visit barnesgallery.org.