A group of several Parkinson’s patients at Hoag’s Pickup Family Neurosciences Institute have been attending the “Painting With Parkinson’s” program since it launched last July.
The patients got to celebrate some of the fruits of their labor on Wednesday, as Hoag held a gallery night on campus in Newport Beach to showcase some of their artwork.
“They surprise me every time,” said Joey Nesler, a medical clinical social worker for the institute who’s the group instructor. “I think that they’re amazing. They’re fearless. Not all of them have artistic training, but they just jump in. I ask them what they want to do often, and one of the responses was, ‘We want to do self-portraits.’ That’s one of the hardest things to do.”