Psychiatry in pictures

Looking across the estuary from Tor Point (1980–1995). Ronald Quixano Henriques (b. 1949). Picture selection and text by Dr Glenn Roberts

Ron is a prolific artist of strikingly and richly colourful images. Commenting on this picture he says. ‘It's like a judge or a doctor looking over his estate, across the valleys, far from the crowds, he's reassimilated his riches'. Ron has spent nearly all his adult life in large psychiatric hospitals and residential care, despite which he has cultivated and sustained a passionate creative life. The succession of vivid and distinctive images he has produced from the early 1980s he attributes to being in very frightening circumstances and ‘ultraperceptive’. He comments that during his time at Digby, ‘every time I tried to paint voices came on the radio trying to distract me from being clever – I know they are not real. For 12 years I've been trying to adjust and express my experiences, trying to put myself back into the world… new paintings I do will not be circumstantial'. Recently Ron has moved from residential care for a more independent but still supported lifestyle. He is gradually fulfilling his aim of becoming more ‘bohemian’ such that he can sit in cafes and watch the world go by, and he has enthusiastically resumed painting.

Another of Ron's paintings has appeared on the cover of the Gaskell publication Enabling Recovery: The Principles and Practice of Rehabilitation Psychiatry (2006), for in many ways Ron's life illustrates some of the complexities and paradoxical possibilities of recovery. These and other paintings are available as high-quality reproductions from his cousin at http://www.gallery36.co.uk; all profits go to Ron.