Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter

- Blurb -

n 1942, at age twenty, after a vision-impaired and rebellious childhood in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine decamped for New York. Operations had corrected her eyesight, and she was newly aware of modern art, so different from the cramped, literal style of her youthful drawings. In Manhattan, she met other young artists and poets, including Jane Freilicher, Leland Bell, Larry Rivers, John Ashbery, Frank O'Hara, and James Schuyler. Her life was hectic, with raucousparties in her loft, lovers of both sexes, and freelance design jobs that included a stint at The Village Voice. Initially drawn to the rigorous formalism of Piet Mondrian, she received critical praisefor her jazzy abstractions. During the 1950s, she began to allow the world around her-interiors and landscapes-to seep into her work. By 1959, her career was on the rise, capped by the Whitney Museum's purchase of one of her paintings. That year, she contracted a severe form of polio on a trip to Greece; suddenly, she was a paraplegic. Undaunted, she taught herself to paint in oil with her left hand, reserving her right hand for watercolors. In her post-polio work, she achieved a freer style,expressive of the joy she found in flowers and landscapes. Living nearly half the year in Gloucester, Massachusetts, and the other half in New York, she took special delight in painting the views fromher windows and from her country garden. Critics found her new style irresistible, and she had a loyal circle of collectors; still, she struggled to earn enough money to pay the aides who made her life possible. At her side for her final twenty-nine years was her lover, painter Carolyn Harris.