When Heather Henry stepped into a paint party four years ago, she was frazzled. She had just found out her son had been using hard drugs. Her mind raced. She felt pain, confusion, a loss of trust. People had judged her.
When she picked up the paintbrush, all of that went away. “It was the first time my mind kind of stopped,” she recalled.
Henry, who had never drawn or painted before, found a love and talent for art that she never had before. She took a risk, quit her job at Deborah Heart and Lung Center and started painting full time.
“I hate to use the word miraculous, but it kind of felt like that,” Henry said. “All of a sudden, I knew how to draw and paint.”
Within two years of digging into her creative side, the Medford resident was witness to another act of “divine intervention.”
“It was this weird thought that popped in my head,” Henry remembered. “I kind of thought it was either going insane or it was God speaking. At that point, my son was doing so poorly, and really very rebellious. And I was very, very heartbroken.”
Her idea? To go into ministry and help those struggling with addiction. Soon after, Henry received a call from a man named Tim — also her son’s name — asking her to teach painting classes at a drug rehabilitation center.
“Have you ever seen in a movie when somebody remembers something and it’s like a tunnel vision?” Henry asked “That’s what happened to me. All of a sudden, I remembered that thought.”
Now, she teaches at several drug rehabilitation centers around South Jersey and in the Kensington neighborhood of Philadelphia. Henry wants to give her students the same feeling of letting go that she had at that paint party years ago.
“There are times that everything aligns and there’s quiet in the room and you can tell they just get lost in the moment,” Henry explained.
She tells her students: “You didn’t sit there and feel guilty. You didn’t feel anxious, you didn’t feel lonely, you didn’t feel rejected and you didn’t feel like this mountain is too high to climb. You forgot, and to sit there and forget and not use a substance in order to forget, is so powerful.”
Henry’s time painting has given her a passion for supporting those struggling with addiction. She regularly visits Kensington, where she gives out blankets, supplies and lots and lots of hugs.
“Sometimes receiving a hug is actually way more healing than anything else,” Henry noted. “What I’ve learned has given me a desire to know them more and love them and serve them.
“They really are overdosing and dying all over the place.”
When she’s not teaching in rehabilitation centers, Henry does commissions and paints the windows of local businesses and homes with images of trees, flowers and wildlife. Her window art is visible at Medford Florist, the Chick-fil-A in Delran and businesses around Avalon and Ocean City.
“I hope it makes people happy,” Henry said. “I think it’s a warm feeling for other people to see a beautiful painted window, even though it’s something so simple and silly.”
Henry wants to give many others the opportunity to lose themselves in art as she can.
“Art is a gift that God gave me,” she added. “He didn’t say, ‘I’m going to take your pain away,’ or ‘I’m going to heal your son right now,’ or ‘I’m going to make this all go away.’ But it’s kind of like wrapped up in a package with a bow.
“It’s my passion and I can’t separate the two. My painting was born out of incredible pain.”
