Recovery Series by Artist Janis Kirstein
Igneous Formed Dreams
c Janis Kirstein
There was another bad car accident. It occurred between our apartment and my husband’s deceased mother’s house. Then, I was walking out of
the pile of vehicles, and I was walking with Jesus.
by
Joyce Lynn
Elegant in an emerald green blouse, artist Janis Kirstein sat,
incongruously, in a swivel chair, before her bleak wall-sized
expressionist painting. Large swathes of black interspersed with small
patches of gray filled the canvas. Iridescent color — purples and
pinks — tinged the intersections, offering hope. The painting evokes
Robert Motherwell, the renowned New York School/Abstract Expressionist
painter. Kirstein in portraiture summons artist Frida Kahlo.
Seven more Kirstein canvases cover the walls of the main gallery. In
the back room at Zephyr Gallery, Louisville, Kentucky, the first
Friday of July 2010, Paul Klee-like drawings Kirstein created while
lying on her back, the only position she could find not unbearably
painful for her, command one wall. These pieces emerged as automatic
writing/drawing, prophetic pictographs of her journey.
Fearful she might never paint large again, Kirstein created the 5′ by 6′
“Under the Knife” paintings in two months. Those 60 days hung
suspended between a diagnosis of degenerative disk disease, the
debilitating residue of a life altering event 26 years before, and
emergency surgery scheduled for less than two weeks after the show
opened. Kirstein’s doctors told her the surgery was mandatory if she
were to ever stand or walk again.
On December 14, 1984, Kirstein and a fellow Kentucky Arts Council artist
were returning to their homes in Louisville on the Western Kentucky
Parkway when engine trouble caused them to turn back toward Benton.
Less than five minutes later, an escapee from Eddyville Prison in a
Ford Impala sedan plowed into the rear of their VW bug.
A Jaws of Life extracted Kirstein from the mangled car, which had flipped
over 16 times.
When she regained consciousness in the Benton Hospital, crushed car
metal chunks embedded in her snarled hair, Kirstein suffered memory loss.
“I forgot who lots of people were,” she remembers now.
“When someone would call, I had no idea who they were, but I could remember the feelings attached to that particular relationship, just none of the facts.”
Regaining her memory was one of many challenges facing Kirstein, so smart she read Sigmund Freud’s book on dreams when she was 12 years old.
SAVED
Dreams are also the bookends of what Kirstein calls her “walk of life.”
A few months before the accident, a Tarot reading yielded the death
card. Just as in a dream, death in a reading does not necessarily
signify death of the body; a part of the Self may be dying. Soon
afterwards, a dream reinforced the Tarot reading:
A guy with red hair on a white horse rode up to me and picked me up and delivered me to safety.
So, Kirstein believed something drastic was about to happen, but she
would be saved. Heeding the warning, she prepared for disaster. She
bought health insurance (although not enough), physically built up her
body, and said a prayer daily to the Saint Patrick Breastplate she would
survive the unknown future.
Since childhood, Kirstein has experienced premonitions. “I see things,”
she says as naturally as the sun rising every day. The seeing is different than the physical act of viewing with the eye and its retina, cornea, and lens. Rather, it is the metaphysical activity of perceiving. “To some, it seems crazy, but it is rather regular for me.”
The two plus decades after the accident were an emotional roller
coaster, sometimes studded with anger, for Kirstein. “Something was taken away,” she told me at lunch between the exhibition opening and the surgery.
Her surgery was pronounced successful within days and within a week,
she was at home, walking around her tree-shaded neighborhood.
Then, she remembered another dream in which she emerges from another car wreck, this time walking with Jesus. She would capture this spiritual aspect of her recovery in Igneous Formed Dreams, an expression of her powerful post-surgery dream and physical and emotional healing.
At first, Kirstein feared the dream foretold another car accident.
Then, she wondered if the Hollywood-like scene might reflect the
destruction in the world from war and greed. On a personal plane, was
she walking away from the destruction and disillusionment of her life
in the aftermath of the 1984 Kentucky Highway devastation, beginning
yet another recovery process?
Now, she now lives from a renewed place of forgiveness and love as she
confronts the challenges in her resurrected landscape.
During the weeks after her surgery and the walking with Jesus dream,
Kirstein began painting another series. The paintings in the series
titled Recovery are softer, the grays more glowing with larger
splashes of color. They hold remnants of the past but also offer
prayers of gratitude for the present and patches of prospects for the
future.
For Kirstein, her RECOVERY series reflects “the feeling of regaining
what I lost, a renaissance/rebirth from a near death experience.”
