The art of salvation
Effingham resident Charles Dalrymple is “living proof” of the healing power of the arts. Lindsey Buchanan shares Dalrymple’s experience in the Florence Morning News:
“When Charles Dalrymple limped into the Morning News office on a recent afternoon, pulling a heavy suitcase full of paintings behind him, he was on a mission.
He wanted to change some lives.
It’s a bold cause, but Dalrymple knows something about it, from personal experience.
In the past few months, he has gone from self-proclaimed “couch pumpkin” – presumably that’s bigger and more sedentary than the normal couch potato – to a veritable ball of artistic fire, who suddenly has a real life again.
What changed him was a newfound love for sketching and painting.
This wouldn’t be particularly inspiring or interesting if not for the fact that the 65-year-old former trucker has been disabled for about half his life. A motorcycle accident 34 years ago nearly killed him and left him without much motor function on his right side. He spent years learning to feed himself with his left hand – “I stopped using forks because I was stabbing myself in the eye all the time,” Dalrymple said – but has never really learned how to write again. His scrawled signature “looks,” according to Dalrmyple, “like something a 2-year-old would do.” He is embarrassed for people to see it.
But he is not embarrassed for them to see his paintings, which he began hammering out with a logic-defying fury a little more than two months ago after a friend gave him some painting materials.”
Via:SCnow.com/Morning News Online