For painter Will Fortier, creativity and healing are closely connected. Will’s painting hangs in the Connecticut Mental Health Center (CMHC), showing the top of East Rock in New Haven—and expressing gratitude to CMHC for its help in his mental health journey.
Concerning this work, Will says, “The painting was inspired by my wife Kitty. She’s also an artist. And I really wanted to do something special for CMHC, because I was in-patient there nine years ago.”
Will has a passion not only for painting but also for boats, the sea, and painting the shoreline. Early in the pandemic, he depicted a coast with waves and hills in Golden Sunlight Over Soothing Waters. The painting was published in the recent issue of The Perch, the journal of the Yale Program for Recovery and Community Health—one of many research groups affiliated with CMHC.
Will also recently created a game in which model ships race across a varied seascape and shoals. He says, “I have creative nights once in a while, where I’m half asleep, half awake, and I came up with this boat race game.” He has designed more games over the years, including many for his niece and nephew when they were growing up.
As a painter and draughtsman, Will has made artwork in multiple formats. He first became involved in art in high school. He learned architectural drafting at Platt Technical High School in Milford, Connecticut. “To this day, I use a lot of the training from architecture in my artwork,” says Will, “to get proper proportions, color schemes, and color schematics that come together the right way.”
At first, though, he worked in black and white. He explains, “In high school, I only used pen and ink or pencil.” After graduating, he worked creating architectural drawings.
Will says, “At the same time, I was starting to get sick with bipolar; I was very depressed all the time.”
I have creative nights once in a while...
Will Fortier
While at an inpatient hospital in Indiana, he painted his first painting in color, inspired by his father’s gift of a set of pastels. Will says, “Of course, it was a seascape. It was a lighthouse, but I put pastel colors in the sky—like a stormy sky—but it was a very cheerful, pastel-color painting.”
Will continued to make artwork during his psychiatric hospitalizations. And it was his stay at CMHC that helped him most fully achieve good health, according to Will. During that time, his treatment team eliminated medications with serious unwanted side effects and replaced them with one effective medication. Today, Will takes this at the lowest dose. The care he received helped free Will from the difficulties that he was facing.
Will says, “I give a lot of credit to Dr. [Robert] Beech at CMHC, and Jessica [Trzaska] the art therapist, and all the other doctors and people that helped me get back on the right track.” He adds that for nine years now, his life has been really good.
One of Will’s major touchstones, as an artist and as a person, is his faith. He says that his “inspiration is what the Bible calls the new world,” citing verses in Isaiah and elsewhere in the Bible discussing a transformation of the world into a paradise. Along with this, Will envisions thriving forests and an end to pollution.
The design of Will’s painting of East Rock owes to both his joy in depicting nature and his wish to bring joy to others. He and Jessica decided that his painting for CMHC would show a landmark that viewers would immediately recognize. So Will and his wife Kitty talked together and chose East Rock. Will also wanted the scene to be a sunset that would cheer people up.
He explains, “I wanted to put blue in the painting, because blue is a soothing color for a lot of people…My original idea was a lot more vivid, it was oranges and yellows, and my wife said, ‘Well, that’s a little too strong; lighten it up a little bit.’ So I actually toned it down and made it a pastel sunset with pinks and purples dominating. I wanted the blue color also to dominate, and that’s why you see that blue mountain in the back.” Will reflects on the goals of his artwork, as well as his ongoing training to teach the Bible. “I just want people to know that there’s hope out there,” he explains. “You can never learn enough about trying to help someone who’s going through a rough time."