Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
Warfare of Art and Law Podcast sparks conversation about the intriguing – and sometimes infuriating – stories that arise in the worlds of art and law with artist and attorney Stephanie Drawdy.
Warfare of Art & Law Podcast
The Healing Power of Art - A Conversation with Artist/Retired Judge Jerry Alonzo & Artist/Attorney Gina McKlveen
SHOW NOTES:
0:00 artist & attorney Gina McKlveen
1:05 artist & retired judge Jerry Alonzo - the impact of depression
3:00 documentary American Symphony
3:50 Suleika Jaouad - release she experienced by painting about cancer
6:00 Alonzo’s “Out of Balance”
6:40 “Civic Sacrement"
8:20 woodwork during Alonzo’s time as a judge
9:00 “The Jury Box”
10:45 “The Judgment”
11:45 “Justice is God’s Plumb Line”
12:30 Environmental works like “Monstronse”
13:15 “Justice?”
14:15 “Passage”
14:40 “Faltering”
16:00 “Arc”
16:25 asylum work inspired “Matthew 25”
20:30 importance of leaning into the pain
21:35 Emily Gould’s comments
23:30 American Symphony - leaning into anxiety through art
26:25 McKlveen’s response to Alonzo’s work
26:45 “Upturned House” by Phyllida Barlow
27:20 “Inflated Balloons”
27:50 Carnegie International
28:40 McKlveen’s work leaning into grief and loss
29:35 “Fisherman on the Roof”
37:45 “Mermaid Mama”
39:25 “Stay Wild”
40:15 “Heather’s Mama”
42:00 McKlveen’s grandparents
44:50 portraiture versus still life works
47:00 other artists who created still life paintings as portraits, e.g., Van Gogh
48:30 Alonzo’s response to McKlveen
49:05 Gould’s response to McKlveen
49:45 Oluwatobi Aluko’s response
51:00 McKlveen’s planned portrait of grandmother with post box like Mona Lisa
Please share your comments and/or questions at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com
Music by Toulme.
To hear more episodes, please visit Warfare of Art and Law podcast's website.
To leave questions or comments about this or other episodes of the podcast and/or for information about joining the 2ND Saturday discussion on art, culture and justice, please message me at stephanie@warfareofartandlaw.com.
Thanks so much for listening!
© Stephanie Drawdy [2025]
I think Jerry spoke to this too of like getting comfortable with the uncomfortable right is something that is helpful in the arts and having conversations around these hard subjects just as much as it is in law right, because we have really difficult conversations and real things happen like that in the law as well that we have to wrestle with, and art and law are the tools that we get to use to have a means to talk about these in a new and different way.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Warfare of Art and Law, the podcast that focuses on how justice does or doesn't play out when art and law overlap. Hi everyone, it's Stephanie, and that was artist and attorney Gina McLevine from a recent Second Saturday Art and Justice online gathering that was focused on the healing power of art. As Gina mentioned, retired judge and artist Jerry Alonzo also joins us, beginning the conversation and sharing with us what it means to him to lean in to the negatives.
Speaker 3:The work I do is wood. Wood sculpture used to be furniture. This spring I think it's around May I was prepping for a show, a two-person show of my work and the other person was a painter. I was pretty anxious about it. I don't know, you know I've done it before, but I was pretty anxious about it and part of it was, I think, that the prep for the show hit at a period when a period of depression Depression is not a new thing for me and those of you who are who have experienced it, know you can be somewhat debilitating, it stops you and, frankly, it stopped me cold and this is something I've had all of my life, most of my life and I was stopped. I had trouble even prepping existing work I had already made, but I also had intended some new work and I just couldn't get step one going on, that there was not a creative thought in my head and, frankly, I thought at that point, after a few weeks of this, saying I just can't do this show. I'm going to contact the gallery and say that's it. No, thanks, take the consequences of that. Well, my wife Kate she talked me out of it says no, come on, give it a try, give it a try. This is nothing new for you. All, right, I said we'll give it a try.
Speaker 3:Right around that time we watched a movie, a Netflix movie, a documentary, called American Symphony. Some of you maybe some of you have seen it. If you haven't, I highly recommend it. It's the story of John Batiste, a musician and composer, and his wife Sulika. John was looking to create the American Symphony, which would involve all sorts of things not traditionally in a symphony native instruments, drums, etc. Etc. And he traveled around to put that all together.
Speaker 3:Simultaneous with that, while he's traveling the country, sulika has a relapse of her cancer. She's in the hospital. She also is an artist. She's an author, a selling author and a musician. So all of her creative outlets were stopped. She could do neither from where she was, with medications being pumped into her regularly. She's not a painter at all, but she has someone to bring her in some paints. She was going to try something, try to get some creative release, used the hospital bed table as her easel and started to learn how to paint. The subject she chose to paint or maybe she didn't choose was cancer. She chose to paint, or maybe she didn't choose was cancer, her cancer and how it was impacting her, how she felt about it, how messing up everything in her life. But she found a relief in that, a release in that. That put a little light on that, put a little light on when.
Speaker 3:I thought of that, when I heard that and I saw her response to it, I started thinking okay, she is leaning into what is troubling her. She is leaning into her illness. She is addressing her illness as best she can given, laying in a hospital bed with chemo going all the time. So I thought, is that something I can learn from? Is that something I can do? And so I thought about it and said how do I feel? How do I feel right now? At that time I feel out of whack, I feel out of balance, I feel trapped, I feel I can't get out of where I am.
Speaker 3:I came up with, and it didn't take too long, a very simple piece. A lot of the stuff is more complicated, but a very simple piece that for me, said I'm out of balance, I'm locked in, the key is out of reach and there it is. There's me at this moment. Sounds a little trite, maybe, but shortly after making that, a little cloud started to lift, I felt better to where I could start getting into rehab or prepping some of the existing work. I got that going and I still had a week or so left, so I was then okay, can I get one piece in that? I had in mind a new piece titled Civic Sacrament. It's a ballot box. On all sides of it are words of people whose words I respect. The top one is Martin Luther King, abraham Lincoln. The title came from the words of Father Theodore Hesborough, who was the president of Notre Dame University, and his words were voting is a civic sacrament. You know, the politics of the world is in my mind every day and sometimes it knocks me down and I felt good about this piece and I'm very messagey, but I tend to be messagey that's nothing new for me, so that felt good.
Speaker 3:The show was frankly successful. I sold a lot of work, stuck with it, sometimes against my better judgment, but it panned out. But where that led me next was the idea of this really this leaning into the negative is. That was a dramatic example for me, but it's something I then thought about. Well, you do that a lot, we probably all do that a lot, and the healing power, but I'd never thought about it. I'll give an example. I was a judge. I held trials, conducted trials and some of them, you know, you get to, you know high profile, get a little nervous about it, anxiety, long before this trial is going to begin, go into my studio and make something. It made me feel better. I felt that I was having some impact on it and I could then go in, go to work and do what I was going to do. Example of that kind of work iselry Box. That's the title of it.
Speaker 3:I didn't have much time, so I'd make a juror. That would be it. I'd get up in the morning and here's a person that I saw yesterday in voir dire. I tried to be very respectful about all of them. Respectful about all of them, but this was the reality. The one in the back left. She could not sit on this case. She said and she's holding up. It was a DWI with an accident and injuries, and she said I can't do that. Well, why not? Because I have a child? Well, how does that impact you? I have a child and it would just frightens me to know that I would be sitting in judgment of someone who hurt somebody else.
Speaker 3:Can't do it. I went out, got out the clock is someone who's watching like when's this thing going to be over? This is boring. Come on, get moving. Second, in the back the green one that's looking over your shoulder I'll do what you're going to do. What are you writing on your notepad? I'm going to copy that.
Speaker 3:I could spend an hour or two and make progress on this piece and I was pretty pleased with it. Then another kind of work I did a lot of, both as a practicing attorney and as a judge family court. That consumes huge amounts of time. That consumes huge amounts of time and it was actually the one I enjoyed the most and felt most at ease and comfortable with. This piece is called Judgment. I think I made it when it was a juvenile delinquency case and there's this kid facing the judgment of others. But then I found I could manipulate these pieces and they could be very different and it would be a whole different piece. It would be maybe a custody case and the one parent supporting the child, or a neglect case or an abuse case, and that also helped me think through that kind of work.
Speaker 3:I frequently, especially in this political climate, feel that sometimes the justice system's a little out of whack. A response to that is a piece called Justice is God's Plum Line. If you know what a plum line is, it's a building tool. You use it so that walls are plum. The plumbob hangs there and you know you open the door or you touch it and it starts going around. For me it was the idea that that will eventually recenter. That's my optimism. You know that I lost early in this story, but you know, gain back. I'm an optimist. Justice will work out.
Speaker 3:Then, on environmental issues, which I'm concerned about, what we are all doing to our environment pieces called monstrance, a vessel that would usually be exhibited in church, that would have an object of veneration in the center. So I did one with a bird. You know we're not paying enough attention to him. I did another one with water, clean water. We're not giving that adequate attention. Same idea Monstrance. H2o is the title of that, one Piece titled, and I made a bunch of these Justice Question Mark, and when I put them out there I offered them to people and said you know, here they are, they're for sale and every dollar will go to legal aid. I like interactivity.
Speaker 3:And the question mark is you know for lawyers and their clients, how things go today for you. You know, was justice going cooking for you or was it not going too well? Question mark. And these fears became a way for me and others. If they chose to say, okay, it was a good day, good day for justice, put the shiny brass one up there, or not. So good, leave the rusty one up there and you know you can move them back and forth. Another peace passage. I made it basically to show all right, we all got a rough time. We got to go through whatever we're going through here. You got to get through the stones. There's a little guide, but the boat gets there, navigates the troubles, gets there eventually. Maybe it gets a little bruised along the way.
Speaker 3:There's a piece called Faltering. It's about 36 inches tall, six inches tall, and the words there are. You know that, words that anybody who's studied law or they're also just in common usage justice is truth and action. It's Israeli Justice, a yearning for what is fine or high I think that's Cardozo and so on. Words that at various times in my studies and in my career were just very, they were cornerstones, they were just important. So I made this piece standing up. I use the bird frequently as an observer, just what's you know. Let's keep an eye on things, let's see how it's going, and then the flip side of that one is it ain't going too well. Altered fell down, but we're still watching, and I got magnets that I use. I like interactivity, and so this piece has the option of going back up and I hope there's a time when I feel very comfortable about it standing back up proudly for all of us. One more Arc A-R-C. It's the words of Martin Luther King Jr the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice. And this is bent, rusted steel and a lathe-turned bowl. And the final one.
Speaker 3:A couple of years ago I went down to the Texas-Mexican border to work on asylum claims in the family detention centers in Dilley and Carnes, texas. I knew zero about this stuff, as did the others I traveled with from Rochester, new York. We did whatever law stuff we did, and it wasn't immigration and asylum. We get down to Dilley and there's the families, the local lawyers, the Legal Aid Society basically took charge of us in a way that said okay, we'll get you prepped here, we're going to give you a day of here's how this works. Clients are going to come in. They're going to be out of the lockup and coming in at a rapid pace and you know, jerry, me, this is your, these are yours, this is your family. You're going to talk to them and I had someone who could help me with translation, a Spanish speaker who is now a lawyer in North Carolina. You would talk to the families and any questions we could go out to the legal aid people who are out there to help us out. Say, ok, here's what I got. What do you think what's next? Help us out. Say, okay, here's what I got. What do you think what's next?
Speaker 3:The first one was a young man with his baby, his one or two-year-old, laying on his chest. He's probably mid-20s. He spoke English, so we were trained to ask what do you fear? That was the asylum issue. Why do you fear returning to your home country? And this young man said to me look at me, I'm homosexual. Do you know what they do to me in Honduras? I fear for my child's life more so than I fear for my own. So, anyway, saw many people. We had a super group who really got into this and we prepared people for their asylum claims to at least be able to answer with enough detail to be helpful to them in there in front of the hearing examiner.
Speaker 3:So this piece is called Matthew 25, and I don't remember the exact words, but it involves you shall feed the hungry, house the homeless, and this is again a plumb bob. The words in the Bible would be clothe the naked, but I went with the plumb bob. So that's what I do, and this piece was a response to how anxious I felt during that two weeks and I felt very good about making this piece and I felt very good about the experience I had. So that is my presentation.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Jerry, and I very much appreciate your presentation and sharing all of this work and the thoughts behind it. I was just going to say I appreciate your candor about how you tapped into what you felt to be able to create this work. I think that's such an important part of the work of any artist and you've just laid it out beautifully for us, and also the fact that you even pointed out that it helped you through your work and I don't think that's true of just lawyers, but certainly, I think, as lawyers and dealing with the types of cases that you dealt with in your work, lawyering and then as a judge. It was perhaps such a crucial part of your personality that you are an artist that you were able to process it that way. I would love to hear your thoughts about that.
Speaker 3:Yes, for me it was, and as I got a little space between myself and the trauma of it, I discovered that that's everybody's issue. No matter what someone is facing, that creates anxiety and difficulty. Lean into it were the words. I came out of it. Lean into it and chiding, moving the problem to the side was not working for me at all. I decided I just need to address it, and for me that was making out of balance. But for somebody else it's doing whatever they do to express themselves writing, you know writing, singing, you name it. So I learned a good lesson on the healing power of art.
Speaker 2:We have a comment in the chat from Vince Proffey that they love the interactive nature of your work, Jerry.
Speaker 5:Jerry, thank you. It's Emily. I just wanted to say thank you so much for sharing your story with us all, because I think it's so important to talk about these things and to share these kinds of coping mechanisms, and I think you know, these are things that maybe people you know years ago probably wouldn't have raised, wouldn't have talked about, wouldn't have been so open about. I think it's so helpful to other people that we have these conversations now and, um, it's really inspiring.
Speaker 5:Your story is really, as is your art, of course, and I wanted to ask you whether, when you sort of started to lean into those feelings you were having through doing your work and expressing, I guess, your feelings and maybe the depression, the anxiety in that way, was it sort of an intuitive feeling that you knew that would make you feel better, or it was more of a kind of intellectual process whereby you thought, okay, I have to make myself do this because I know it will be helpful to me. Or was it more of a, like I say, more of an intuitive feeling that you did the work and then maybe the realization came later that actually that was a process that was really helpful. So then you sort of would say to yourself okay, I'm feeling like this, so I need to do the work. Maybe it's not something that you know intuitively, I just would go to do, but I know that if I push myself to do it I will feel better. I don't know if that made sense. No, I got you.
Speaker 3:No, it wasn't intuitive, because it didn't. What was it? It was watching Sulika do that with her cancer, and I had never seen, I had never thought about that before. And this I'm talking about a film. You could watch it tonight. It just was, oh, she's got the worst thing in the world going on. She's near death and she's going to paint how she feels. And she doesn't paint. So no, it was strictly. She delivered me a gift and I said, well, let me try, and it was. It worked for me. It worked for me. I leaned into what I do.
Speaker 5:Yeah, amazing and that is an amazing film. I kind of came upon it by chance, but it's really, yeah, it is very inspiring and it kind of stays with you. Yeah, I would recommend getting to watch it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and I was just going to say it's interesting because you've shared with us these pieces that you had made prior to that, I believe and the fact that you had already had that experience with processing your uh, feelings and your anxiety through your art, and that it would take something else, like an external stimulus, like the film, to be able to help you link that in for this current challenge with the last show.
Speaker 3:Well, I wasn't aware that I was doing it. That was part of the light. I never thought consciously that when I'd get up in the morning nervous about my day as everybody is, whatever their day may be that going into my studio and making a juror was leaning into anxiety. It was making a juror, it was. It put a smile on my face and, and you know so, no it it. And so the end of that story was that I looked back and said, oh, I have been doing this. I never thought about it. Maybe I was a little deeper in the weeds on this one that I'm, you know, my example I'm using for the show, but you know I think we all, we all do it in various ways.
Speaker 3:So I thank you all for your questions and comments and glad to be here.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much. So we will turn to Gina McLeveen, who is going to share her experience having different aspects of creating paintings about loss and grief. Gina.
Speaker 1:I can't begin without also just kind of praising Jerry and that presentation a bit before of just how moving it really is your artwork and also your message-y-ness. I'm glad that it is that I wanted the first piece that you brought up. I don't know if you're familiar with this artist, jerry, but her name is Phil. I think it's a Filda Barlow. She had a piece that was in the Carnegie International. She had a piece that was in the Carnegie International which is held in Pittsburgh. It's called Upturned House.
Speaker 1:I saw it when I like the senior year of high school or something like that and it was really really moving. It has a similar upturned unbalancedness to it. So I would really recommend you see that work at some point. You see that work at some point and on that um, I think that your work so much of um, even the the faltering with the justice falling down. It reminded me of another piece I saw at the carnegie international. It was inflated balloons, um, and the balloons inflated balloons yeah, with like different letters and they spelled out various acts of an international law.
Speaker 1:That's not coming into mind right now, but it was a human rights law and the international lasts like several months, so over time these balloons would obviously lose their air and kind of collapse. Um, and as I'm referencing these pieces, I'm just like jerry has this quality that, like you, should apply to the carnegie international if you want it um, your work is amazing.
Speaker 1:I love the materials that you use. Both my grandfathers are woodworkers. My late grandfather would make toys for us as kids and he'd always bring those out, so it was a sweet presentation that you gave. I also resonate personally with the jury box. I just stepped into a prosecutorial role so I have obviously a lot of interactions with jury members coming up and I think that is a really precious illustration of jurors. I tend to focus more on realistic representation, so I love like seeing people in an abstract sense. That was really really well done, so thank you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, absolutely so. My work, as I said, and similar to Jerry's, it's this leaning in aspect to the negative and the hard and the heavy. For me, it's a lot around grief and loss. For me, it's a lot around grief and loss, which seems to have been a pattern that I didn't realize a lot until I started taking a look at the experiences people were telling me about or the works that I was creating. It was almost like we were talking about a natural kind of reaction to when I was hurting. I would grab my paint brushes and I'd go downstairs and I'd just, you know, paint what I was feeling, and that had a way of, you know, letting the hard stuff roll off and turning the really negative emotions into something I could step back and be like wow, that's really beautiful. A piece that I did. It's called Fisherman on the Roof. A piece that I did. It's called Fisherman on the Roof. This is a piece that I created on a wood panel and my family live in Pennsylvania and so I didn't have a car down in DC, so my dad would often drive and pick me up and in the summers we would stop at this orchard on our way down to DC and get fresh peaches and it was a family run farm and that sort of thing.
Speaker 1:So the year of 2021, which was the same year that I graduated from law school we turned into the farm, like we did the past two years our annual little trip and I saw that they had like a grad sign, like congratulations 2021, grad sign, and I made a mental note to you know, ask about that when I, when we got to the you know the peaches and the checkout line and things, so we were the only ones in there. It was early morning. My dad picked up his peaches and I'm looking around at the it's basically a garage where they sell everything out of our barn and they had pictures of like little kids on the walls and so I just quipped, I was like which one of these is the college graduate? And the older woman at the cash register just goes completely silent. And I have that oh no, what have I done? Kind of moment. You know, like what did I? What did I say? And then she proceeds to tell me that he had passed away, he did not finish his graduation year, but they still put the sign up for him.
Speaker 1:He was involved in a car accident Obviously not what I was expecting to hear at all Was really moved by not only his legacy that she was relaying to us, but also the way that she was handling it, because it was still very fresh. We were there in June. I think the accident had taken place a few weeks even prior to that. So, everything being really fresh, and I walked away from that interaction being like, oh, I didn't even ask his name, like that was, that would have been the simplest way to try to figure out, or like remember the person, try to figure out, or like remember the person. So I'm driving out the driveway, dad has his peaches and things and I'm just like, oh, what could his name be? And for whatever reason, alexander came to mind. So I kept that in my mind the whole way we're driving back to DC.
Speaker 1:And the second my dad dropped me off at my apartment. I started doing Google searches from the area we were in, the name Alexander. I eventually find his obituary and the individual's name was Kai Alexander Burkett. He wasn't. He was 17 years old, I believe at the time of the accident, a wrestler. He had so much ahead of him. And in that reading all of that and just that entire interaction. A week later I call back to the orchard and I say Hi, I don't know if you're going to remember me had the conversation with the same woman I had a week prior and I said Can I do a painting for your family? Almost as a way of like, an offering, like I, I just really feel I need to do this. I was like I don't know how long it's going to take. Do you have any specific requests? Things like that. They had no requests, they were just honored that I even, you know, was offering this to them.
Speaker 1:So, again, I had just graduated, so I was in the middle of figuring out my own life. I carded this two feet by four feet board with me everywhere I went. I moved back to Pennsylvania, I was studying for the bar exam and so on my time from studying for the bar. When I wasn't studying for the bar, I was down making a mess of this painting. I eventually finished it around the time that I was headed to Maryland where I sat for my bar exam.
Speaker 1:So along the way, obviously that was July, so it was peach season all over again. So I was like dad he was, he went with me, thankfully, had some moral support for the bar exam as well. So we piled up in the car again and we drove down to the orchard on our way to Baltimore where I was taking the bar exam. And we get to the orchard, dad gets out and gets his peaches. I'm carrying this big canvas up to our wood panel, up to the same barn we were in about a year prior, and the same woman was there and I was like I don't know if you're going to remember me, but here's the and I'm crying. She's crying um, and she asked me she's like, can I give this to my daughter, which would have been Kai's mom? Um, and I said, of course, do with it whatever you want, um, around Christmas of that year. Well, actually, um, carry on, go take the bar exam.
Speaker 1:I remember my dad asking like you know, are you nervous about the bar exam? And I was. My dad asking like you know, are you nervous about the bar exam? And I was like, dad, honestly, I could care less about an exam like that. What we just did, like that's what I want to do, you know, like, whatever it is law, art, like that feeling, that's all I. That's like what I'm chasing right moments like that. And so, again, like in December of that year, I got a message from Kai's mom saying that, with a picture of this painting hung up in the new edition of their house, she was really struggling at the time with his death and also, when this painting arrived, of changing the house at all. That's something that happens a lot in grief, like when you lose someone, you want everything to stay the same. You don't want, um, you want to leave things the way they were when that person was around. So, um, she was like getting that painting was like confirmation for her to like move forward with this building projects on their house. So, um, sorry, uh, kai and this painting is in their family room. They had seven kids. Kai was the second oldest, so he had an older brother.
Speaker 1:Each of these waves depict the children of the family this pond. Because he had an Eternity Outdoors channel. He was super into the outdoors and I watched through the videos just trying to study like who was this kid, who is this person? And there was this one video of him grabbing a lawn chair on his parents' roof and fishing off into the pond, and he had an umbrella, originally attached to the chair, and then the wind kept blowing the umbrella. So he goes inside and grabs the sombrero and I'm like, I feel like this is the only like this could be the only kid that thought to do this and I thought that would be a beautiful way to capture him and who he was. The lanterns off to the side they did a memorial of the service you know in his honor and so this is kind of depicting that. All the people that would have known and loved him standing around this pool that he's fishing into obviously the orchard, the peaches of how I know and understand the family yeah, that was. This is the story of Kai. I, my dad, just went and got peaches last month or two months ago. I guess at this point I'm losing track of time, but yeah, they're a special family. He was clearly a special person and this piece obviously holds a really big place in my heart because of just who they are and who he was.
Speaker 1:Around the same time, in this law school slash, becoming a licensed attorney time frame, I had several again, just several stories of either friends or classmates just telling me about their loss. I don't know what is. I joke sometimes where I should have like trauma just tattooed on my forehead because, for whatever reason, people are, just, they share with me some really difficult experiences and I treat that very delicately and as a super big honor and privilege and a purpose. Honestly, this first piece, mermaid mama I call her my law school classmate our 2l year lost her to cancer. I can't imagine going through I know everyone always says that right, I can't imagine. I can't imagine. But truly on top of a pandemic and everything else, just going to law school is difficult, right, anyone in that time is incredibly hard. She dealt with it and I would have been a mess. She was, she's much stronger than I am. But she asked at our graduation if I would paint a picture of her mom, which I did. I had met her mom our 1L year, so this was a very difficult piece.
Speaker 1:It was kind of the first time someone formally asked me to paint someone who they lost and it had a huge responsibility attached to it, right, not only because I met her mom, but also this was our chance to preserve some of who she was for my law school classmate. I struggled a lot personally in doing it. You know, constantly kind of asking myself, asking her mom right, like, should I put this color here. What about this, you know? Should I incorporate this? My law school classmate had given me she knew she wanted her in like a Lily Pulitzer style dress because she wore those all the time. She loved mermaids. They would vacation to Hawaii together all the time. So that was the essence of of that piece.
Speaker 1:Then a law school professor had told me the story about her mom, who also tragically died while she was in law school, who, after she had given one of her mock or moot court competition arguments when she was a law student, her mom had given her a dozen roses with underwear, lingerie in it and a note that said stay wild. And as my law professor was telling me this story, you know she was clearly moved by it and I wanted to create a painting for her to help remember her mom. So this hangs in her office as a way to, you know, remember her mom as well. All of these pieces were put together, probably in a matter of four months, I would say so. The last instance was a friend from Pennsylvania had lost her mom as well and immediately texted me in the same breath, almost. You know, mom passed away. Would you create a painting of her and this one? I had never met her mother, so it was a much different experience. I had never even really seen her mom, so this was the first time I was seeing her and I caught the resemblance of how much she looked like my friend, and this was one of her last, probably portraits taken. It was at her my friend's son's wedding that this picture was depicted and based off of.
Speaker 1:Again, just a way, almost like an offering, like someone brings a, you know, a dish to someone after a funeral or something like that a hot dish. I felt like this piece was my offering where I traveled back to Pennsylvania I was still in DC at the time and you know expressing my condolences for the loss of her mom. And, yeah, this was my again, just something I treat as my gift, my offering to people who have experienced loss and entering into that grief with them, to the point that I might not personally have experienced the loss, but it's almost like that vicarious grief to use kind of the legal term where you're going through the motions with and alongside them, helping them carry the burden of what they've gone. And then, lastly, I will share with you all some of my grief. So these are images of my grandparents. My paternal grandparents are both now deceased and my maternal grandparents are, thankfully, still with us. Last year they celebrated their 70th wedding anniversary. I created this painting for that event.
Speaker 1:I had known for a while that I wanted to create portraits of them.
Speaker 1:I'm the youngest of all the grandkids, so I always feel a bit uh, shorted on time with them, uh, whereas my older cousins have kind of gone about and had their lives and their kids and their homes and have settled I am a few years behind, we'll say so um, my wanting to create these portraits of them was my way of preserving them for the people who will enter into my life that won't get to meet them personally.
Speaker 1:I have visions of these pieces in my home someday and can point out to my kids and explain and tell them stories about my grandparents.
Speaker 1:And I found in this process I'll say specifically for my paternal grandfather here he passed away when, um, I was still in high school it was the summer before my uh senior year and in creating this uh piece a little over 10 years later, um, it was really hard to recall his face, um, his resemblance, resemblance, and I struggled a bit. I relied on my older brother for critiques and helping me re-remember what my grandparent or grandfather looked like, whereas the others who were still living at the time, I was much more able to recall how they looked and able to capture their resemblances a bit more easily and naturally. So that's a bit of my experience with painting through grief and loss. It's a theme I feel like I'm exploring constantly. It's work that I enjoy doing. I think it's an emotional labor of love and care and responsibility, preserving who people are for the people who love them, and it helps me personally, like I said, in dealing with the the grief and giving it space to breathe through paint and storytelling and things like that.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, Gina. I also wanted to just follow up on a couple of points that you've raised in the article that you wrote, as well as here the idea of doing portraiture versus a still life to honor the memory of someone. Could you speak to that?
Speaker 1:so, um, the pieces I created, uh, as soon as my paternal grandfather died, um, I had done a charcoal drawing of boots with crumpled up pieces of money around them. It was a phrase my grandfather would use all the time. He would say bet your boots. And then another piece I did, again almost immediately following his death, was laying in the grass, there was a Bible, one of the wood figures that he had created. This was an acrylic painting and then a picture of us from one of his birthdays. So it's me, super young, and him like blowing out candles on a cake.
Speaker 1:And I realized, looking back, how, in the moment, after my own grief, I really struggled with, you know, grief, I really struggled with, you know, dealing with the loss of my grandfather and almost like depicting his person immediately for my own sake.
Speaker 1:So how I dealt with it was through the things he left behind, the moments I remembered about him that I didn't want to forget, like the things he said or the things that he loved to do. It was my inability to kind of face that he was gone and, like I said, it took me about 10 years, a little over 10 years, to finally create a painting with his actual portrait and in that time I realized I forgot a bit about how he looked. I had to rely on photographs that I couldn't paint him from life. I couldn't. It shocked me honestly how much of him I had forgotten. So creating the still life immediately were again just my inability to face the fact that he was gone. It was the only thing, creatively, I could muster up to kind of deal with him no longer being here and not seeing him anymore.
Speaker 2:And I appreciate it so much that you were I'm not sure if you were looking for it intentionally or just found it when you were doing the article, but looking back at other artists who had done the same thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so I had learned that I was on some sort of museum tour, I think in the National Gallery of Art, and the docent had pointed that out that this was a portrait that Van Gogh had done to honor his father. It was similarly to books in the Bible, just depicting maybe similarly how Van Gogh may have felt with the loss of his father, that inability to kind of just face the fact that they are gone and really just looking at the things they leave behind, because in the end, when they're gone, that's all we have. Yeah, it was really striking to me as well finding that and was a way other artists who have come, you know way before me have have dealt with grief and the loss of someone. They love.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah. Thank you so much for sharing all of the work and your process and and your experience creating that work. Does anyone have any questions or comments that they'd want to share about what Gina has offered?
Speaker 3:I just want to say that the work is beautiful. The story is powerful. I got tears in my eyes, gina. I got tears in my eyes, gina. You're hitting it on a lot of directions. Yourself, you are helping yourself heal and you're helping a lot of people heal the mother of I, the family, et cetera, et cetera. That's beautiful.
Speaker 5:Thank you. Yeah, I was going to say exactly the same. Gina. Thank you so much for sharing that story and all of your beautiful, beautiful work. And, yeah, such beautiful stories and so very generous, gina. So generous because doing those works I know you were saying you know it helped you as well, but that's such a massive sort of emotional investment and you didn't know that family with the peaches and wow, and you became part of their lives, they became a big part of your life over all of that time and, um, yes, amazing, gina, really amazing thank you yeah, hi, gina, I don't know what to say.
Speaker 4:Like I haven't like looked at art from this perspective before. Like I know that you could. You can use art to express grief, but having someone like do it and I'm looking and listening this is the first time that I'm seeing this kind of art done live. This is the first time I'm experiencing this. And this is so powerful because recently a friend of mine lost a dad and we've been talking about it. The burial is a few weeks and it's, it's just like, it's so beautiful, like what you're doing is so beautiful, it's so powerful, I think. Well, that's all I have to say. Like it's, it's powerful thank you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I am right there with you. I also, um, I lost my maternal grandma uh, about two months ago now, at this point, and it was. I'll save a lot of the details, but I was in Paris and the day before I left I went to the Louvre and I saw the Mona Lisa for the first time, and a few years ago I thought about I wanted to do a painting of my grandma. It's similar to like a Mona Lisa, but just in the fact I don't know if anyone knows this the Mona Lisa has her own mailbox and I love that fact about her. I love that people can write her notes and my grandma was someone who, all through law school, always wrote me letters and notes and things like that.
Speaker 1:So I have this vision of creating a portrait of my grandma. I hope it doesn't take me 10 years, like it did my grandfather, where I will have a portrait just of her, with some sort of mailbox where people can come and write letters, offer I don't know what, maybe like it's a way of them to deal with their own losses and parting words that maybe they didn't get, um the the backend of then that story. So I saw the Mona Lisa, and then I traveled home and my flight was going to be delayed and I called my dad and my brother. I was, like, can you come get me? Like I really just want to be home, um, and so they do they. They pick me up at the airport. That was much further than my original, you know, ending destination was supposed to be, and on the way home dad told me that you know, grandma might not be there when we get back.
Speaker 1:So we drive across the state and the next morning I went and see my grandma and the first question she asked me was how was your trip? And like she is, she's on her way out, like very clearly, um, and I just think more people, uh, talking about. You know their losses and their grief and dealing with it, whether with however they need to. Um is really important, um, and she did not make it past that day, uh, and so I want to be able to honor her through my art making process just as much, whether it's through writing, like jerry was saying, whether it was through, um, you know, creating a movie, creating a dance, creating wood sculptures, creating whatever it is, if you can partner with someone when they're going through really difficult things through art, it really, like I can tell you, it changes people's lives. You'll change your outlook as an artist and it's yeah, it's an honor to be able to step into those kinds of things and feelings with people there will be links in the show notes to learn more.
Speaker 2:if you were intrigued by this podcast, it would be much appreciated if you could leave a rating, a review and tag Warfare of Art and Law podcast. Until next time, this is Stephanie Drotty bringing you Warfare of Art and Law. Thank you so much for listening and remember injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.