Photo by S. Auberle
While enduring a garage cleaning this week, I found this photo which had been missing for years. IsAbel Beaudoin was a great lady and an amazing, multi-talented artist. The poem only tells a small portion of who she was...
IsAbel
“…originality
above all else.”
~ IsAbel Beaudoin
It was all there, all that was left
of the passion that consumed her…
prints, metal sculptures, fabric, batiks;
Noah’s Ark—the procession of carved animals
marching across an entire wall;
handmade paper, cast and painted;
a purple lady, tall and regal, like IsAbel herself,
oils, watercolors, acrylics, pastels,
all the pieces shining as brightly as she.
Two times I was privileged to meet her,
once, at her home, with bright batiks fluttering
from a clothes line in the sun
like flags announcing the country of art,
and then at the great show of her life’s work,
with treasures enough to fill a warehouse,
where she looked at me from her wheelchair,
smiled and said, “I’d
like to paint you in those blue beads…”
At eighty-seven, IsAbel began to fail.
Creation no longer emerged from those trembling hands,
and that is how we knew, her caregiver explains.
Except for one day, the woman says,
when she arrived to find a plain white cabinet
that held Isabel’s paints had been transformed.
Tall trees danced on the doors and sides of the white
box,
painted in a shaky hand, but vibrant and alive.
IsAbel never could bear a colorless world,
not when there was so much splendor in hers.
In Memoriam:
Isabel Beaudoin 1921-2009
