Painting, and recovering

NYT profiles the artist Elizabeth Murray, who continued painting after brain surgery:

The lone piece that hangs in her studio now, "The Sun and the Moon," was put together a little differently. Ms. Murray painted it while recovering from brain surgery necessitated by metastasized lung cancer. Although she had worked out its basic structure last December, before the cancer was discovered, she only began painting after she returned from the hospital after surgery in March.

Initially, she said, "I was really tottering in there - I could barely climb up the ladder." And, though she usually makes very deliberate decisions about color, fretting over her choices and refining them with drawings, this time she was not able to act on them so easily: she had trouble locating the right tube of paint - even the one she had just put down.

So, she focused more purely than ever on the act of painting, using whatever color or brush came to hand, and adjusting the colors and marks later...

Follow the link to see the artist and the finished work, "The Sun and the Moon."