Life in Art

“I love to paint. I love it.”

            The first thing I noticed when I walked into Marie’s room was that the walls were laden with breathtaking paintings. Each one had a unique personality, from the Spanish dancer on the back wall to the trolley station by my side. In the corner of each scene was the swooping signature of the artist who sat in the rocking chair by the window.

            Marie was born on New Year’s Eve in 1918 and grew up in Passaic, New Jersey in the midst of the Great Depression. “Most of my friends’ families went through the same thing I did. But you had no choice,” she said. She told me that her parents were lucky to have jobs with the economy the way it was. After High School she worked in the Botany Mill like most of the people in Passaic.

            Marie loves to think back to her carefree summers as a child. Her father would take her and her brother, Charles, on a bus to Palisade’s Park at the top of a hill. She has always loved the ocean and remembers going to the shore with her family, sitting under the boardwalk.

Later in life, after she was married, she and her husband would travel up to Maine in the summertime. “Whenever we had a chance we would just take the car and just go off.” They too would sit under the boardwalk and watch the waves. “It was so on the spur of the moment. On the way we’d see something that interested us. We’d stop and then we’d go on.” Perhaps these ventures inspired Marie to capture fleeting moments such as these with her paintbrush.

Marie usually didn’t paint things she saw, but would look at other people’s pictures. She didn’t try to imitate them, but would rather put pieces of pictures together and use light and color to create an image that was all her own. “If somebody painted it, I knew it came from their heart,” she explained. For instance, she did one painting of a Spanish dancer with a guitarist behind her. “I liked her expression and everything and of course I’m very fond of music. I started painting and I wanted to paint it with what I thought she should be wearing . . . .It was a different picture with the same feeling with what she was doing.”

Naturally, the ocean is one of Marie’s favorite subjects to paint. Her husband used to love Marie’s work, especially the painting she did of his uncle’s store in Connecticut. She described the painting to me, “To the right of the picture there was a river and a riverboat used to go up and down the river. That’s what she [a woman in the painting] was doing; she was waiting for the boat to come. There were tracks to the left of her and that ‘s what those two women were doing, waiting for the trolley to come.”

            Marie is now 95 years old and lives at the Pine Hill retirement home. Her son hung up all her paintings, telling Marie that they should be up for everyone to enjoy. Speaking with her, her love of painting is apparent and her passion for the craft has brought joy to her and to anyone who has had the pleasure of viewing her art.

My name is Jillian DiPersio and I am a sophomore at Windham High School. After learning the stories of my own grandparents, I have been interviewing the elderly. Through my research and interviews I have been able to dig up some incredible bits of history from the lives of local residents, as well as learn about people who are the products of a different generation. If you or someone you know would like to share your stories, please contact me at jillian@dipersio.com.