My dear friends, I am saddened to announce that my mother, Doris Jean Smart, passed away in the very early hours of the night. She went peacefully, in her sleep. She died of CHF and COPD, and had been declining slowly for several years. My mother was a difficult person to live with in these last few years. She was nervy and controlling, jealous of attention, mistrustful of others good wll. It says so very much about her strength and love that she was able to raise her daughters in a way that made her, in fact, difficult for us-- she never once passed forward the circumstances of her own childhood that had left such scars on her psyche. The two most important things in her life were her husband Ron Smart, and her art. She was, an extraordinary artist. She was deeply motivated and very prolific. She had a terrible habit, in fact, of painting over her finished work-- I gave up trying to catalogue her, as half the time the canvases would no longer exist in the form Id recorded, unless I physically took the works and hid them from her. This practice has resulted in a textural complexity that I honestly dont know how she could have created in any other way. Its certainly made her work hard to photograph-- a fitting metaphor for her in other ways, as I now realise. Her art is what hurt her health. She painted in oils, and would work for an hour, or for hours, in her studio, with the doors closed. She preferred turps and year after year of the fumes did her no favors. But it, and the love of her husband, her children, is what made her happy. When she could no longer paint, at the beginning of the summer, the measure of her joy in life was lost. I have learned so much in these recent years that Ive spent with her. I suspect that I will still be collating these things for years to come. *** We have no immediate plans for any sort of memorial for her, Im sorry. Your kind wishes are deeply appreciated. Thank you
Posted on: Wed, 12 Nov 2014 22:27:44 +0000
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