I just read about artist Cordola Volkening in yesterday’s New York Times. About 18 months ago, she was diagnosed with brain cancer. Surgery and chemotherapy didn’t help, so now she is left with only months to live. Ms. Volkening faces her fate through obsessive painting, sometimes completing several paintings in one day.
I am inspired by the paintings, not just because of the circumstances surrounding their creation, but the use of color, abstraction, and gesture. These are beautiful and not at all self-conscious.
Quoting the NYT article:
So she spends her remaining time in a comfortable chair by a window at the studio. She painted years ago but with more mental interference, she said, making it more of an “intellectual pursuit” than the urgent, spontaneous process it is now. Now the brush itself seems to decide what to paint.
“I paint what comes out,” she said. “It’s not intellectual — it’s instinctive.”
She paints rapidly and spontaneously and her images are primal and powerful. There are urgent brush strokes, bold colors and bleak backgrounds. There are faces laughing and others cringing. There are winged characters flying into the beyond. There are people hugging each other. Different as they are, she said, they all reflect aspects of her condition.
She says the terminal illness has simplified things, washing away the worry and petty preoccupations that almost made life more hard when she had plenty of it. And she has never felt more connected to the canvas and to her creativity.
