Prologue

In 1959, Nell Blaine was a rising star in the New York art world—one of her paintings was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art—when she traveled to Mykonos, Greece, to paint. After several months, she suddenly felt very weak; her illness was finally diagnosed as a severe form of polio. Although she was now a paraplegic, she retrained herself to paint, turning the limitations caused by her disability into a positive force. She would travel to far-flung locations and continue to share her intimate life with women. This book is the first to reveal the full extent of her public and private life.

A Taste of Success

In 1956, Nell joined the new Poindexter Gallery. Reviewers praised her first show. The following year, she was awarded a residency at Yaddo (the artists’ colony in Saratoga Springs, New York), meeting poets Jane Mayhall and May Swenson. Afterward, she traveled to Mexico City and Oaxaca, where she worked at night by the light of an oil lamp. On her return, she spent several weeks at the MacDowell Colony in New Hampshire, followed by another stay at Yaddo in December, when her fellow residents were poets Barbara Guest and Jean Garrigue. Nell spent the summer of 1958 in a rented studio in Gloucester. It was there that ARTnews writer Lawrence Campbell visited her to write a major piece about her work on Harbor and Green Cloth, illustrated with photographs by her friend Rudy Burckhardt. A second version of this painting was purchased by the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Richmond

Born in 1922 in Richmond, Virginia, Nell Blaine was a rebellious only child, a loner fussed over by her mother. Her early years were plagued by serious vision problems, finally corrected in her teens. She was active in extracurricular clubs in both high school and college, where she encountered avant-garde art for the first time. Although she had to drop out of college after two years for financial reasons, she took an evening class in painting that helped her connect with new ideas in art. Meanwhile, she worked at an advertising agency, gaining experience that would stand her in good stead years later when she needed to earn a living. At age twenty, she left for Manhattan, ignoring the pleas and threats of her mother.

Gloucester

In the summer of 1974, Nell found a cottage to buy in her beloved Gloucester. Named for her mother, Eudora Cottage would be her and Carolyn’s home from June to late autumn every year. Nell made detailed sketches for plants in the many gardens she envisioned. The house also had to be renovated to accommodate a wheelchair user’s needs. Exploring Cape Ann required the assistance of a household staff of three, one driving a vintage Cadillac. In her paintings of local vistas, Nell avoided postcard fidelity to nature, preferring to capture the effervescent quality of light on water and gardens rife with blooms. This chapter also takes a quick look at other notable artists, including Stuart Davis and Marsden Hartley, who drew and painted Gloucester landscapes. In 1975, when Nell’s poet friend Howard Griffin died in Austria, he left his property to Nell—a bequest that would broaden her horizons.

Travel and Turmoil

In 1964, Nell and Dilys left New York on the Queen Mary, bound for London. The next stop was Burton Bradstock in West Dorset, home of poet Howard Griffin, where Nell began painting garden views. The women spent time in Paris and Lisbon before flying to the Caribbean island of St. Lucia, where Nell’s dealer Elinor Poindexter and her husband owned a banana plantation. Nell delighted in the native plants and birds. She taught the teenaged son of their cook to read and write and enjoyed visits by Arthur Cohen, her major collector, and poet Galway Kinnell. But despite the lush surroundings, the eleven months on St. Lucia were plagued by inconveniences, from quarreling workmen to scorpions and torrential rains. Nell’s April 1966 Poindexter Gallery show, which included many works completed in St. Lucia, was well reviewed. Then came a great shock: in late May, Dilys suddenly moved out.

Stricken

In 1959, after cruising down the Nile, Nell arrived in Greece. A friend had told her that studio space was cheap and the scenery gorgeous. On the island of Mykonos, she wound up living at the spacious home of a new friend. Avoiding the strong sunlight, she painted the view from her window—an indoor-outdoor approach that she would continue throughout her life. Her idyllic life was shattered when she was stricken with polio. Friends rallied to have her airlifted to New York. In the hospital, lying in an iron lung that breathed for her, she very nearly died. Recovered sufficiently to use a wheelchair, she was told that, as a paraplegic, her art career was over. But, aided by the solicitous care of her English nurse, Dilys Evans, who became her lover, she began to retrain her more usable left hand for oil paintings, using her right hand for watercolors.

Keeping On

Nell made several visits to Griffin’s farmhouse in the Austrian Tyrol, capturing the glorious view in her paintings. Like all her trips abroad, they involved enormous preparatory efforts and airlines unequipped to deal with a disabled person. In 1976, she moved to the Fischbach Gallery, where her shows continued to be well reviewed. But in an interview, she sounded skeptical about gains for women in art and expressed hostility to the art world’s love of “aggression” and “novelty.” Nell’s micromanagement style was part of her need to feel in control. During the winter months, the friend who was Nell’s housesitter in Gloucester received many demanding, complaining letters. In the late 1960s, Nell returned to printmaking to make a lithograph for a book commemorating Frank O’Hara. A deluxe version of her sketchbook, printed in Italy according to her detailed specifications, was published in 1986 with an introduction by John Ashbery.

Paris, Poets, and Poverty

Freelance income and frugality allowed Nell to embark on her first trip abroad in 1950. In Paris, she felt as though she had stepped into an Impressionist landscape. Bowled over by Chartres Cathedral and the museums, she also visited two of her art idols, Jean Hélion and Fernand Léger. She became involved with a German woman with whom she traveled to Florence and Rome. Back in New York, while living with Midi Garth, she enjoyed hanging out with several of the poets later known as the New York School: Frank O’Hara, John Ashbery, and Kenneth Koch. Bebop records played at her boisterous parties, which often included marathon games of poker. In her painting, she had embarked on a period of experimentation with figurative imagery. Midi and Brook evokes a pastoral scene in Vermont, where the women vacationed. Meanwhile, her freelance work included serving as designer of the Village Voice.

Alive Still

Nell’s fiftieth solo exhibition opened at the Fischbach Gallery in 1991. Her late-life projects ranged from illustrating a book of poetry by the late Marge Piercy to calling the governor of Virginia in an effort to stay the execution of a convicted rapist and murderer. During the 1990s, Nell’s health problems included eye disease and breast cancer as well as postpolio syndrome. The increasing curvature in her back tired her and made sitting at an easel painful. But she carried on anyway, often painting flower still lifes. This chapter briefly discusses her style with reference to flower paintings by other twentieth-century artists, including Mondrian, Hartley, Bonnard, Monet, Ellsworth Kelly, and Georgia O’Keeffe. Her last Gloucester painting, Rock Shadows (1995), hints at closure while embodying a sense of the continuous rhythms of life. Nell died on November 14, 1996. The following January, artist and writer friends gathered at her memorial.

Embracing Sensation

For many months after Dilys’s departure, Nell was inconsolable. Then, when painter Carolyn Harris entered her life, Nell began a long-lasting relationship. Her ongoing concern was hiring, training, and retaining aides. Many women attempted the job, with little success. It was not until the arrival of Jestina Forrester in 1976 that the turnover stopped. But Jestina’s personality and Nell’s demands made for a volatile combination. Carolyn’s own role—lover, studio assistant, cook, and sometime aide—was not an easy one. Her studio time was severely circumscribed by Nell’s needs. The two women would have many serious quarrels, which Nell tried to analyze. During these years, summer visits to the homes of friends in Vermont and upstate New York, and to a rented cottage in Gloucester, yielded many new paintings. Nell’s mother died in 1970, leaving her surprised daughter a nest egg, but her financial situation remained dire throughout the decade.