Mary Hambleton - The Brilliant Painter, The Lovely Woman

Lotus

Welcome back Dear Readers.


It always seems that we are 


losing too many fine artists.

    

      Last year for example, 

one of my favorite pianists,

Alicia de Larrocha

passed away.

Now who's going to serenade me with 

Mompou's Impresiones Intimas?

The great Jazz player, 

composer, conductor, educator,

and author of 

The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, 

George Russell

left this Earth.

Dear Dodo

And

groundbreaking 

Choreographer 

Merce Cunningham 

is gone too.

Misericordia

A 
lot
 closer to home,

a friend of mine,

after a courageous,

years long battle     

with cancer

died.

Mary Hambleton
was quite a brilliant painter, 
a lovely woman, Mother, and Wife.

I will miss all of these great artists.

Elements of a Periodic Table

This posting 

of 

Global Around Town 

contains some of Mary's works 

and a few images that may have inspired

and humored 

her.

Dot Calm
It just never seems fair 

when we lose such great artists. 

Particularly when they are so young.

Query

Ivory

Nine Dodos

Game Plan

Target

Hard Rain

"And what did you hear, my blue-eyed son ?

And what did you hear, my darling young one ?

I heard the sound of a thunder, it roared out a warnin'

I heard the roar of a wave that could drown the whole world

I heard one hundred drummers whose hands were a-blazin'

I heard ten thousand whisperin' and nobody listenin'

I heard one person starve, I heard many people laughin'

Heard the song of a poet who died in the gutter

Heard the sound of a clown who cried in the alley

And it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard, it's a hard

And it's a hard rain's a-gonna fall."

Enough

Blue White Dodos

4 Blue Dodo

Waiting for the Miracle

A note here from Mary's husband Ken Buhler - 

            Painter Mary Hambleton was diagnosed with advanced melanoma in June of 2002. For 6 plus years she defied the odds, living a full life though a challenging one, mounting several one-person shows, teaching, traveling and receiving a Guggenheim, two Pollock-Krasners, a Gottlieb, and a Fellowship to Ballinglen Foundation in Ireland. She died on January 9, 2009.

           Her work chronicled her journey of living with the disease, starting with the introduction of images of extinct species into her once abstract work, and later images from the innumerable scans of her body. Mary never let her illness define her, but chose to define it instead by transforming it into art. As her own energy waned, she took the scans of the disease that would ultimately take her, and she turned those into striking and profound images. In that sense, she had the last word, because her body of work is a living, poignant reminder of who she was.

(Many thanks to my Dear Friend, Mary's husband Ken Buhler, for his contribution. )