A ‘self’ portrait of an artist with memory loss

Art, its creators will tell you, is the result of introspection, the often painful process of digging into the past, into dreams of what might be and nightmares of what was.

The painter Marc Chagall, for example, never forgot the tiny, mud-spattered village in Eastern Europe where he grew up. Images of it cropped up in the corners of his works throughout his life.

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In an effort to better understand creativity, Johns Hopkins cognitive scientists are studying artist Lonni Sue Johnson, who was left with amnesia after a case of viral encephalitis.

William Faulkner could never have produced his doomed Southern aristocrats without his family’s haunted past, nor could Kurt Vonnegut have written about the horrors of war without the experience of being a soldier.

But what happens to an artist whose memory is drained, who has almost nothing to draw on?

A small but intriguing show at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore explores that mystery by looking at the work of a woman who suddenly lost most of her past.

In 2007, Lonni Sue Johnson was an accomplished illustrator, and a musician, pilot and farmer. She had done half a dozen covers for the New Yorker magazine. Her brightly colored illustrations brimmed with gentle humor and puns.

On Dec. 30, a snowy morning, a farmer stopped by Johnson’s organic dairy farm in Upstate New York. He noticed she was confused and unable to take her eyes off the mouse of her computer. He called a medical worker down the road, who took one look at Johnson and rushed her to a hospital in Cooperstown. The 57-year-old artist was a wreck. She only stared at her hands — first one, and then the other.

A virus had invaded Johnson’s brain. Before doctors could halt the encephalitis, it ravaged parts of her hippocampus, which is crucial to memory formation. Profound amnesia engulfed her.

Three and a half years after her illness, Johnson has few memories. More devastating, she lost the ability to form new ones. Unlike the amnesia that is suddenly cured in so many Hollywood movies, Johnson’s inability to form new memories cannot be repaired. The present is constantly slipping away, but she has not lost her soft humor. But had she lost her ability to be an artist?

At first, she had trouble walking, talking and eating. The condition affected her ability to reason as well. Although she never forgot her own identity, she recognized only a few people: her mother, her sister and a few faces she had known as a child.

Art had been her window on the world. Her mother and grandmother were artists. She’d had a 31-year career. But after her illness, she couldn’t draw. Her pencil hovered just above the paper, never touching down. The window had slammed shut.

What happened next is the reason to visit the Walters show.

With Johnson unable to draw, her mother, Margaret Kennard Johnson, tried having her copy simple shapes. Lonni Sue, who, as an illustrator, hated to copy anything from anybody, put pen to paper. She reproduced the shapes exactly.

Then came another breakthrough: Margaret drew a squiggly line on a paper with a red pen. She asked Lonni Sue to complete the drawing. When Lonni Sue’s blue pen touched down, a cat emerged.

Another turning point came six months later. A puzzle-maker, who was a friend of the family, dropped off three word-search books. Lonni Sue had rebuilt her vocabulary, and she devoured the exercises.