Lonely cowboy’s thoughts

Abstract

Previously learned skills or talents can be preserved in dementia. Experts have suggested that paintings done by Willem de Kooning from 1988 on began to lose their coherence.1 De Kooning was diagnosed with AD in 1989.2 William Untermohlen, who focussed on self-portraits, showed, during probable AD, difficulties in accurately representing individual facial features, both in terms of structure and spatial relation to the rest of the face.3 Creativity in the setting of dementia has also recently been reported.4,5⇓ All patients had been diagnosed with frontotemporal dementia (FTD).6 The authors put forward that selective degeneration of the anterior temporal and orbital frontal cortex decreased inhibition of the more posteriorly located visual systems involved with perception, thereby enhancing these patients’ artistic interests and abilities. We describe the clinical and the new artistic skill of one patient with FTD who showed remarkable creativity in …