Biology and art was an unlikely combined course of study when Guiellermo Cuellar arrived in the United States in 1971 to complete his bachelor’s degree at the University of South Florida.
But it was a few years after earning a master’s degree in counseling there — while the Colombian-born student was getting his doctorate from the University of Massachusetts — that he developed a “life-learning model” of parallel circles, looking like a bicycle.
The twin circles mapped the difference between our “survival, fear-based” behavior patterns and the “creative love-based, proactive behaviors” by which we can embrace life.
Cuellar, had grown up in Bogota in a family of artists. He settled in the Pioneer Valley in 1975, continuing his artwork, even after setting up a counseling practice and doing consulting for corporations and nonprofits around the country.
With his wife, Dale Schwartz, he moved from Leverett to Sunderland in 1980 and set up the New England Art Therapy Institute, and the Center for Creative Consciousness in 1981.
Leverett Crafts and Arts Center, where Cuellar has had a studio since 1994, will host an exhibit, “Yes — Life is Art,” beginning Saturday, Aug. 6. It focuses on how Cuellar “used his creative process to access, accept and address the multiple aspects of his relationship with cancer. It celebrates his love for life and the role that art expression played while facing choices and decisions.”
The exhibit, which expresses gratitude for the gift of life, including the support Cuellar continues to receive “from many beings here and beyond,” includes a collection of “caregiver’s” sketches, watercolors and drawings by Schwartz, offering her perspective on her husband’s experience.
The exhibit runs through Aug. 27, with the artist presenting a talk that day from 4 to 6 p.m
In 2013, Cuellar, who is now70, and had been doing yoga since 1965, and teaching it in Amherst as well, went to the doctor because he felt something in his abdomen that prevented him from bending in the usual way. He strongly believed he had a tumor.
“I’ve done yoga, and I’m very flexible. I feel my body inside. When you’re a yogi, you feel things other people who are not as intimate with their body can.”
He said his doctor, “examined me and said I have nothing. … So I went to another doctor,” who said she could check to see if there was something in his bladder.
Again, Cuellar said that it was a tumor in his abdomen, and she agreed to do an MRI. “Sure enough, there was a mass about 15 centimeters by 15 centimeters, a cytoma, growing in the connective tissue, on the fat, pushing all my intestines.”
Meanwhile, in his creative mind, Cuellar imagined a torch he used to burn the mass.
“When I burned it, I found myself going up my spine and up into the world and seeing a big star and feeling wings fluttering,” he says. ” It turned out burning the tumor, the cancer – That’s why I’m alive right now, because the radiation has been effective where chemotherapy hasn’t. That’s why I trust images.”
The images in the Leverett exhibit trace Cuellar’s three-year journey and how he faced the ordeal of making decisions with this rare form of cancer for which there was little known. They include paintings, such a Cape Cod sunset appears like the hospital’s radiation mapping that show his tumor shrinking, as well as a self-portrait that documents perceptions distorted by his treatment with a cannabis chemical, and others that play with the kaleidoscope of medical choices he juggled.
“I have been using art as a way of knowing, using imagery as a way of creating a perspective of the way we process information,” says Cuellar, who had his tumor removed at Dana Farber Cancer Institute in Boston in June 2013, followed by radiation there a couple of months later. “I was actually having a conversation with the paintings: What do I want tumor to do? I wanted the tumor to not be prevalent. … The interesting thing about cancer — it actually woke me up.”
Walking day after day for a month along a hospital corridor where bird images adorn the walls, Cuellar imagined a painting that connected the corridor with all that he’d been facing, with birds, with his appointment slips, patient badge and a map of his colon, along with Emily Dickinson’s poem, “Hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul.”
But following checks every six months, a CT scan in July 2015 showed a new tumor growing quickly. After a trip with his wife to Spain, “I was catapulted, so to speak, into having to make very fast decisions about my treatment, about the options that I had. There was nobody who could tell me with certainty what they can do.”
Faced with uncertainty, and inspired by Kelly Turner’s best-selling book, “Radical Remission,” Cuellar began drawing his various options on 5-by-8-inch cards,
Beginning with Turner’s nine recommended practices for overcoming cancer — including having a strong reason for living, trusting intuition, deepening spiritual practices, embracing social support, creating positive emotions, radically changing diet, and releasing suppressed emotions — Cuellar “kept going” with additional cards, about 30 in all.
“I made cards of all the options I had. Singing bowls. Swimming. Acupuncture and herbs. One Gram THC Theater.” One card — chemo with alternative — shows two test tubes combining into a smoke that forms a serpentine Caduceus medical symbol.
Cuellar used them as Tarot cards, laying them face down to see the choices he, or in some cases his health care workers, should consider.
“Trust your intuition,” the card that he picked one day as he was about to go see a doctor, who Cuellar then presented with his cards, face down, to choose from.
“No, I’m a doctor,” the physician said. But when the patient insisted, “I’m not going to hold it against you; it’s just your intuitive opinion,” she selected the same “Trust your intuition.”
Cuellar ultimately chose Rick Simpson Oil, made from the tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) of cannabis, to reduce his tumor’s growth.
He switched in January to Massachusetts General Hospital, where the radiation oncologist said the palliative dose treatments he’d been getting earlier could be increased to reduce the size of the tumor.
“I’m in a world in which nobody can say, ‘This will cure you,’ says Cuellar, who refused chemotherapy but agreed with a prescription for the drug Sutent for a month and a half. “It didn’t do anything, except it messed me up. … I got subdued by the doctors saying, ‘This is going to work, you can tolerate it. It almost killed me. It paralyzed my stomach. I couldn’t eat, I lost 30 pounds in the process over three weeks because I couldn’t eat or drink.”
The treatment was complicated by an allergic reaction to Prednisone, says Cuellar. He was helped by friends in renting an apartment close to the Boston hospital for daily radiation treatments that began in February and ended in late March.
“This is where I feel very lucky. The radiation starts to work,” says the artist.
Yet, confronting the prospect of his life ending contributed to a sadness for Cuellar that coincided with a series of dreams he had, while he was ending his hospital stay this spring. The intense sadness, he realized through the dreams, emerged from “all the times in my life I haven’t paid attention to my intuition, where I have followed somebody else’s advice because I felt they knew more than I did. Those moments in my life have created such pain and sadness about the loss of my own potential that I was confronting as my life was ending, to opportunities not taken beccause I’d relinquished my will to somebody else’s. It made it very, very clear: Every dream was one of the seeds I had given up on myself, from childhood, in adolescence, as an adult.”
The last of the dreams gave rise to a painting in which a woman dressed in white rides a bicycle along a path with a basket of daffodils, large energy-filled cumulus-nimbus clouds against the blue sky in the background and a large yellow parasail.
“I was in a field being bombarded by rockets … the rockets disappear, they don’t explode. I was up here on the hill and go down to the lake, where there’s a group of guys with shotguns. One of them comes from water, hands me a shotgun, and I say this shotgun is wet, it doesn’t work, so I open it, take the ammunition and throw it in the lake. And as I came up on top of hill, a lady on a parasail, riding on bicycle, lands and skids her back wheel on the road, I went like this (thumbs up): “Job well done!”
Cuellar woke up and during the 10-minute radiation treatment, the dream’s meaning revealed itself. The rockets were radiation, and the guys were fighting over chemo — a fight and a treatment Cuellar refused as toxic — a choice “well done.”
“The dream simply said I didn’t want to fight. While I was getting radiation, it became really clear that the fighting was a toxin, was something that’s going to make you sick … that’s hopefully going to poison the cancer cells before it poisons you. … When I said, ‘Job well done,’ this image of this woman became many parts: the part of me that’s my intuition, also my wife … also the radiation oncologist that was willing to take a risk and did the research that ended up giving me the stronger radiation that turned out to be killing the tumors.”
It’s the bicycle, though, ridden by the woman in the dream-painting, that’s the powerful symbol harkening back to Cuellar’s 1970s twin circles of fear-based survival and creative behaviors.
“Thats the balance,” he says, paraphrasing Einstein, “because the bicycle symbolizes that in order to stay in balance, you have to keep moving. Life is like riding a bicycle. Front wheel and back wheel, this one propels, that one makes choices.”
Cuellar, whose art displays the journey of his shifting attitude, now sees in his most recent medical tests two tumors that continue to shrink, yet one is still growing.
“I still have the cancer,” he says. “The next phase is time to make peace with myself. It’s also a time to heal, whatever that means.”
The artist’s images have given him the perspective he needs in any given moment, and “helps me to put fear in perspective and to see the reality that’s going on, with different eyes. It’s a gift that everybody has, but we don’t use it. … Art, if you listen, talks. … You have to trust yourself, you have to trust the dialogue.”
Cuellar’s art has taught him, “We can heal, but theres’s a point where the healing is accepting your mortality. … The art helped me through every moment, not only to accept the reality that I was going through, but also to accept the choices that I had.”