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