A fourth act in colors

OLGA LIVSHIN

Artist Lola Penn survived the Holocaust, built a life in Australia and raised her children. She then became a painter – at the age of 90, following a life-threatening illness. Lola’s artistic journey is on display in the summer exhibit Lola’s Fourth Life, now at the Zack Gallery.

The show consists of four distinct parts: paintings Lola created by herself, paintings she made with her Vancouver-based son Ian Penn, paintings she made with local artist Eri Ishii, and a two-channel documentary about Lola’s life and her work with other artists. The movie was filmed at Lola’s nursing home in Sydney, Australia.

At a panel on creativity and aging held at the gallery on Aug. 25 in conjunction with the exhibit, Ian Penn spoke to the Independent about his mother’s late blooming as an artist.

Surprisingly, prior to her nineties, “Mother was never artistic,” Ian said. “She started developing dementia around the late 1990s…. I visit her several times a year and, each time I [visit], it’s more and more difficult to find her. Her gradual mental deterioration, the loss of short-term memory, affect[s] every conversation. It [i]s frustrating, hard on us both.”

After a serious illness a couple of years ago, Lola also lost her mobility and is now wheelchair-bound. As part of her recovery therapy, she began painting ceramic pots in bright colors. “When I arrived in the beginning of 2012,” her son recalled, “I saw her pots and I thought we should start painting together, as some kind of parallel play. We interacted with our brush strokes and colors as we couldn’t with words. We became closer than ever before.”

The mother-and-son paintings of that period are lovely abstract compositions, reflecting Lola’s joy in finally finding a way to communicate with her son, and vice versa. Even though, due to her dementia, she might not be able to cognitively recognize or explain her feelings, she reacts to colors and textures on the canvases, selecting her own shapes and lines. The short documentary captures Lola’s delight, and the friendly synergy of the two brushes giving birth to the same image.

“She does much better physically and emotionally now, when she paints,” Ian said. “She is calmer.”

“It’s like gymnastics for her brain,” added Eri, who was also on the panel. “Painting helps her focus; it engages her. Dementia damages pathways in her brain, but art seems to help Lola establish new pathways.”

When the Tokyo-born, Vancouver-based Eri saw the paintings Ian made with his mother, she was inspired to visit Lola and paint with her, too. “I wanted to find Lola’s world. Her story is extraordinary,” she said. “I thought people should know it. We did several interviews with artists and psychologists to understand what was happening. And we found a filmmaker in Australia, Joel Peterson, to shoot a movie of our painting with Lola.”

Eri said that she had never painted in collaboration with another artist before and wasn’t sure how it would work out, but she was very pleased with the results.

“Lola emits light and love,” she said of the experience. “We became almost one person while painting together. I knew what Lola was thinking, feeling, and the film shows our creative process…. Lola’s face lit up when we used bright colors. She said she watched me, what paint I’d use but, in reality, I followed her. There is a real fierceness and intensity in her art. She knew what she wanted in a picture.”

One of the questions that arose during the panel discussion was why Lola started painting so late in life, why she had never painted before. One of the panel participants, psychologist Leora Cuttner, explained: “The creative process is all about exploring, taking risks. But Lola was a Holocaust survivor. Even after the war ended, her world was still broken, and her life hard. It was a continual survival. A lot gets suppressed during survival. You don’t take risks. You try not to get noticed – the opposite of artistic freedom. But with her dementia removing most of her self-imposed prohibitions, Lola was liberated to take risks, to try new ways, to create. Art for Lola was healing, therapeutic.”

Landon MacKenzie, a renowned Canadian artist and Emily Carr University professor, who joined the panel, agreed. “With dementia, Lola lost her self-consciousness, self-judgment. Her cognitive abilities suffered from the disease, but the non-verbal way became easier. She tells stories with her paintings. She makes intuitive decisions what colors and shapes to use for her self-expression. Look at her clothing in the movie. She surrounds herself with patterns and bright colors and enjoys it. She is free of censoring herself.”

After the panel discussion, gallery director Reisa Schneider summed up the general impressions of the work displayed: “Lola’s art is not about the product – her paintings. It’s about the process. It’s uplifting. My mother is 96. When I next see her, we’ll paint together.”

Lola’s Fourth Life closes this weekend, on Sept. 8.

Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].

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