First, if you missed yesterday’s post about the artist we’re trying to identify you need to go back and read it first so you understand, okay?
Second, if you’re easily affected by talks of suicide be warned there are a few mentions here so feel free to skip this one. And no judgement because sometimes I’m in a bad place and have to protect myself until I’m in a better place too. Giant high fives for protecting yourself. I love you.
Third, I think we may have found the artist.
My friend Tami and an anonymous reader here on the blog both found the beginning thread I needed to dive deeper into the records and newspapers. From what I can tell, the unknown artists immediate family is all gone now but there might be very distant cousins still alive who may not want their family history shared so easily. It’s complicated because I am very in favor of lifting the secretive stigma regarding mental illness, but also I’m against personal stories being shared without consent so I’m trying to meet in the middle in only sharing the name of the (probable) artist rather than the names of the rest of her family even though all of them have been dead for decades.
If we have the right person then “L Perea” is Laura Perea.
She and her twin sister were born in 1914 and lived with their parents here in San Antonio, about 15 minutes away from my house. Their father worked at a university and taught foreign languages, which might explain why her art was in three different languages. She and her twin were incredibly bright and were awarded often for the highest grades at school. In college Laura continued to excel and had the highest gpa of any freshman at her university. The twins never married and they stayed with their parents. In 1948, when they were 33, Laura’s twin died after intentionally ingesting poison at their home. Two years later Laura is listed in the 1950 census records as a patient in the San Antonio State Hospital Mental Institution (previously called the Southwestern Insane Asylum).
And a few years later, her paintings were made. History shows that the San Antonio State Hospital (still in existence now) was terribly overcrowded, understaffed and had serious issues in the 50s so her art probably shows a very truthful reality.
I assume Laura had a breakdown after losing her only sibling, or possibly attempted suicide at the same time but survived. I’m still looking, but so far she just sort of disappears (as far as I can find) until her death here in San Antonio in 1995. She lived, is all I can say. She was cremated, like the rest of her family. Location of ashes unknown. My hope is that she lived a full life and continued to do art and heal and tell the stories of those who didn’t have a voice. I’ll keep looking.
But what I do know is that yesterday when I went in for my ketamine treatment (for depression) I started to fall into the same sort of panic that I normally get when the world goes black, but instead of the isolating dread I often feel, I found myself comforted in the knowledge that I wasn’t alone. It sounds ridiculous but somehow it felt like someone from across time held out a hand. And Laura’s image of the women waiting for electric shock therapy came back to me so clearly.
And probably that’s just the hallucinogenic drugs talking but it was the first time in the years that I’ve been doing this treatment that I didn’t feel quite so alone when everything went dark.
Today I’m more than halfway through my one-year substack challenge of doing art every week to improve my mental health and today I’ll be sharing my drawing from last week, which is embarrassing far from the skill Laura mastered, but which feels somehow prescient:
Thank you Laura, for your shine.
And thank you to everyone reading this now who may doubt their own importance but who may one day send out ripples through time to someone who desperately needs them.
PS. I don’t know what I’m going to do with her art but I think they deserve to be seen. I’ve reached out to some outsider art museums to see if they are interested in sharing them with the world, but no response yet. They may be too old. Too tattered. But if that fails I have some other ideas. I’ll keep you posted.
Thank you for listening, friends.
Thank you for staying.
Thank you for shining.
