A lifetime of art, music

OLGA LIVSHIN

Even in childhood, Ava Lee Millman Fisher couldn't decide what she liked best: painting or music. She loved doing and excelled in both, but her parents, respectable and mildly religious Jews in Montreal, didn't encourage painting as a profession.

From the Judaic point of view, painting could, in theory, lead to idolatry. So Millman Fisher graduated from McGill University as an opera singer, although she kept painting as a hobby. She performed operatic arias, Yiddish and Hebrew songs, and worked as a music teacher in Montreal until she got married and moved to Vancouver. Even then, in the late 1960s, at the earliest stages of her career, her favorite class was one for children with special needs. At the time, when nobody in Canada had heard of music therapy as a treatment for people with mental disabilities, she discovered that music helped her special-needs pupils.

Life didn't treat the young singer nicely. The oldest of her four sons was born with a mental disability. To help him and the others, as soon as she could, she went back to school to become a licensed music therapist. For more than 18 years, she has been practising musical therapy for children and adults. Currently, she works with adults suffering from severe mental illnesses.

"I respect my clients," she said. "Most of them are beautiful people who have to overcome terrible challenges. I've found that music is a catalyst in their therapy. Music helps them to go forward with their lives."

To relieve the stresses of her working life, Millman Fisher paints. "Painting is so relaxing," she said. "Sometimes, if an idea strikes me, I get up in the middle of the night to paint."

Millman Fisher's paintings reflect her personality: deeply spiritual, full of brightness, kindness and compassion. That's why she chose to work with people with mental challenges. That's why there are so many colors and flowers in her pictures. Her aspiration to reveal inner beauty and to illuminate harmony even in mental illness, naturally leads to her artistic themes.

"I use watercolors because they are closest to music," she said. "I tried oils and acrylics. In them, if you make a mistake you can cover it up, but in watercolors you can't. Watercolors are transparent, like music. They flow like music. You can sing in watercolors."

Most of Millman Fisher's paintings are either floral abstractions or Judaic motifs. Often they are both. Flowers and leaves, musical signs and Judaic symbols meld seamlessly in her images, where every picture relates a story, real or allegorical. Sometimes, it's just a memory of the artist's childhood, like in the lyrical "Lake Lirico." Sometimes, it's bursting with sensitivity and esthetic appeal, like "Recovery."

A complicated weave of musical graphics and menorot, blooms and Hebrew letters surround the landscape of Jerusalem in one of her latest paintings, "Symbol Syncopation." "Things happen to all of us," the artist said, "but in different orders and with different rhythms. We all live a little off-beat to each other. That's what makes us humans."

Another painting very important to the artist is "Despair Descant: Of Descent Arising." Jewish tragedies and hopes struggle to get free from the canvas, and the new growth sprouts out of a downed and bloody Magen David. The painting is a hymn to the resilience of the Jewish people, a prayer for rebirth and fulfilment.

While Millman Fisher's watercolors adorn many private collections, the upcoming exhibition will be her first personal art show. It will take place at the Main Plant Store in Vancouver during January and February.

Millman Fisher admits that she wears many hats. She is a singer by education and a musical therapist by profession. She is a watercolor painter and a writer, having written articles on the multiple aspects of music therapy for numerous publications. But by her own words, "the most innovative and important of her many artistic accomplishments are her four sons."

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer.

^TOP