Never doubt your shine.

Solving a 70-year-old art mystery.

If you follow my blog you may already know about this, but there are updates so I’m going to recap.

On Sunday I picked up some fascinating but terribly sad art at an estate sale. It’s not my style but it spoke to me, particularly because the artist seemed to be drawing from her life in a mental institution in the 1950s. Her art was bleak, funny, incredible, terrifying.

(Translation: “Waiting for electroshock therapy.”)

You can go to my blog for the longer story and more of her art, but I’m both happy and sad to say that we were able to (probably) finally identify her.

(If you’re easily affected by mentions of suicide there is one here so no worries if you want to skip this one until you can handle it. Seriously, sometimes I have to protect myself when I’m in a dark place and I’m proud of you for taking care of yourself if you’re there now. I love you, friend.)

I believe the artist (L Perea) is Laura Perea. There’s not much known about her. She and her twin sister were born in 1914 and they lived with their parents in a house about 15 minutes from mine. She and her twin excelled in school and Laura had the highest grades of her university her freshman year. But in 1948 when they were 33, Laura’s twin died after intentionally ingesting poison at their home. Laura shows up in the 1950 census as a patient of the San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution, which is where I assume she created these artworks that span several years.

I’m still looking, but so far she just sort of disappears (as far as I can find) until her death here in San Antonio in 1995. She lived, is all I can say. She was cremated, like the rest of her family. Location of ashes unknown. My hope is that she lived a full life and continued to do art and heal and tell the stories of those who didn’t have a voice. I’ll keep looking.

But what I do know is that yesterday when I went in for my ketamine treatment (for depression) I started to fall into the same sort of panic that I normally get when the world goes black, but instead of the isolating dread I often feel, I found myself comforted in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. It sounds ridiculous but somehow it felt like someone from across time held out a hand. And Laura’s image of the women waiting for electric shock therapy came back to me so clearly.

And probably that’s just the hallucinogenic drugs talking, but it was the first time in the years that I’ve been doing this treatment that I didn’t feel quite so alone when everything went dark.

Today I’m sharing my drawing from last week, which is embarrassing far from the skill Laura mastered, but which feels somehow prescient:

Thank you Laura, for your shine.

And thank you to everyone reading this now who may doubt their own importance but who may one day send out ripples through time to someone who desperately needs them.

Thank you for listening, friends.

Thank you for staying.

Thank you for shining.