The Boldness of Her Brush Strokes

A few months after her 90th birthday, my grandmother, Betty Madden-Work, spent a week in the hospital and then moved into a nursing home, where aides helped her dress each morning and a physical therapist cheerfully forced her to exercise. As I sat next to her bed while she napped in the afternoons, I thought about Grandma and the regular childhood visits my sister and I made to see her, including two weeks we spent with her each summer in Springfield, Ill.

We'd go swimming at the community pool, check out books at the public library, take trips to historic sites, go to the movies with Grandma and her friend Mary Quint. At Grandma's big white house, we spent hours working crossword puzzles, putting together jigsaw puzzles, sewing nightgowns for my mother. Grandma took us to tennis lessons, got a book on typing and set us up with her old manual typewriter, taught us how to paint with watercolors. I remember her explaining how to mix paints to create new shades, how to wash the paper with a wet brush to get soft blooms of color, how to sprinkle coarse salt on the wet paint to get a snowflake effect.

From watching Grandma, I discovered the importance of learning and doing new things. Long ago, she worked for the Illinois State Museum, and she even wrote a book, "Arts, Crafts, and Architecture in Early Illinois," an incredibly detailed analysis of the creative work of the settlers, filled with insights and illustrations. But her real work was as a painter, and she became a respected watercolor artist. My parents have her paintings of each of the three houses they have lived in. I can still see Grandma perched on her folding chair in the street in front of each house, working away and fielding requests from the neighbors for paintings of their houses, too.

She kept learning new techniques, taking classes and going on retreats with other artists. And then, in the 1980s, she started to create a different sort of work: large paintings full of imaginative, dreamy shapes, forms emerging out of the backgrounds in rich colors, lights and darks dancing across the space, swaying as if underwater or behind a veil in one's mind.

I remember being puzzled and impressed by these paintings when she first started making them. Here was an established artist, near 70, picking up a radically different form and style. She explained her creative process to me nonchalantly:

I just drop a few colors on the paper and let them dry. Then I come back the next day and turn the paper around and around and see what it looks like. And maybe I'll see something, so I'll drop in more colors and shapes and see where it goes.

I realize now that her method holds a clue to something I could have learned better from Grandma, a lesson that's not about doing things but about a way of being. Through her paintings, I see someone who is able to trust herself to create, to have faith that she can drop in shapes and turn them into something. Evident in her work is an artist who believes that she can put onto paper what is unformed, only glimpsed, in her mind. She knows she can create beauty out of nothing but blank paper and dried paint and vision.

The confidence visible in Grandma's paintings showed as well in her personality. She suffered many tragedies: Her first husband descended into mental illness and she effectively became a single mother, then a divorcee, in the 1950s, when that simply was not done. Her second husband died of a heart attack after less than a year of marriage. Her oldest son died in the military in Germany, and a beloved grandson, his life's promise spread out before him, was killed by a drunk driver. But Grandma rarely faltered.

When she made a decision, it was done. I remember, for example, the phone call my father got when she had decided to marry Bob Work, her third husband, in the early 1980s. My dad hung up and turned to tell us that his mother had called to say she was getting married and to ask for his blessing. But she wasn't really asking, I knew.

After Bob's death 15 years later, Grandma lived by herself in their condominium for a few years. Then, suddenly, she announced she was ready to move into a retirement home. My parents were resistant; they feared she'd lose her independence. She moved anyway and found a rich life there.

Grandma laughingly admitted her stubbornness and attributed her decisiveness to that. But I saw fearlessness in her actions, too. I have been told that courage like hers reflects the belief that one can handle whatever happens. If so, it shows as well another of her beliefs about painting: There are no such things as mistakes, only "happy accidents."

One of my grandmother's paintings now hangs in our living room. It's one of the first she painted in her later style. She had started by dropping rich maroons and a few pinks and browns onto the paper. Turning it around one afternoon, she focused on a spot that had the shape of a man. She made the spot into Henry David Thoreau and the painting into "Thoreau's World." Thoreau is only half visible; his torso floats in the center of the work, and he looks off into a maze of trees and vines and flowers. It's certainly not a realistic rendering of the Massachusetts woods. But it is a perfect evocation of Thoreau's spirit, of the courageousness of his act of heading off into the wilderness to thrash out his own truths.

That person in the painting could be Grandma, too, trying to find her way through a maze of deaths and disappointments -- and possibilities. Certainly she always found her own way through her woods. And that painting suggests her greatest lesson to me: Though I might sometimes feel lost in my own woods I, too, will find my way, and I'll be just fine.