This week marks International OCD Awareness Week. To honor it, we’re spotlighting an artist we’ve admired for years.
Jeff Sparr co-founded PeaceLove, a nonprofit that helps people find peace of mind through expressive arts. He also lives with obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD). He counts creativity among the most important tools he uses to care for his mental health, and he has spent his career handing that tool to others.
Finding the Brush
Jeff’s OCD symptoms began in college. At Ohio State, he studied economics and captained the men’s tennis team while intrusive thoughts grew into anxiety attacks. His anxiety became severe enough that he spent time in a psychiatric hospital, and he carried those symptoms home to Rhode Island after graduation.
Jeff found relief through counseling and medication. Then, in 1994, a friend suggested he try painting. He had no art training, but he picked up supplies on the way home and started painting. He calls himself the Forrest Gump of painting, because once he started, he kept going. More than thirty years later, he still paints.
At the easel, Jeff found calm and a sense of control over his symptoms. He discovered a new way to express himself there too. “Through my painting, I could convey what I couldn’t put into words,” he told The Good Men Project.
From One Painter to a Movement
Around 2009, Jeff and his cousin Matt Kaplan filled a shopping cart with art supplies and brought them to the children’s intensive treatment unit at a local psychiatric hospital. Jeff told the kids about his own experience with OCD. Then he asked them to paint what gave them peace of mind.
Many of those children had trouble putting their feelings into words. With a brush in hand, they found another way to say it. Jeff and Matt turned that visit into PeaceLove.
Jeff designed the PeaceLove symbol, a peace sign joined with a heart, to stand for peace of mind and love in your heart. Today his team leads workshops in poetry and movement as well as painting. Through its CREATORS program, PeaceLove trains frontline professionals, from school counselors to teachers, to bring those workshops to their own communities.
Jeff’s Advice: Make Room to Create
Jeff is upfront that he isn’t a clinician, and he prescribes creativity anyway. “Creativity can be life changing, but we need to get it to people.” For people living with OCD, he offers two places to start.
Name what gives you peace of mind, then make time for it. In his workshops, Jeff asks people to stop and think about what calms them. Your answer might be a sketchbook or a guitar. Once you know, protect a little time for it in your week, whether that means painting for twenty minutes or writing a few lines of poetry before bed. Jeff had no art training when he first picked up a brush, and PeaceLove’s workshops ask for none.
Let go of getting it right. PeaceLove builds its workshops around creating honestly and without judgment. For people living with OCD, that permission counts, since you can carry the urge to make something feel “just right” onto the canvas too. Jeff describes creativity as a chance to settle into the moment and find some peace of mind there. A crooked line or a muddy color belongs on the page as much as anything else.
Our founder, Janine Francolini, felt this herself almost a decade ago at a PeaceLove event. During a two-hour workshop, she got stuck. She couldn’t make her painting look the way she pictured it, and she felt a wave of self-judgment she didn’t expect. She wrote afterward that she had to return to practicing self-compassion, a skill she thought she had already mastered.
Creativity Alongside Treatment
Jeff’s own story includes counseling and medication as well as a paintbrush. OCD specialists see creativity the same way, as a companion to treatment. Some OCD treatment programs now offer art therapy and therapists use creative work to help clients ease anxiety.
If you or someone you love lives with similar challenges, look for a therapist trained in working with clients who have OCD and ask how creative practice might fit into your care. Jeff started with a friend’s suggestion and a bag of supplies. You can start with his question: what gives you peace of mind?
To learn more about PeaceLove’s workshops and the CREATORS program, visit peacelove.org and follow @peacelovefoundation on Instagram.
