The Palm Beach Post from West Palm Beach, Florida • Page 559

a 1. vV lli.ii. vlX y' -7 Wm'A 4 i 4 Critic Giulio Blanc calls Lourdes message 'Cu-- ban nostalgia a lost paradise she will nev- er Cuban Landscape was painted in 1992. Medio Punto depicts Lourdes' childhood home. She was raised by her grandmother and grandfather, a Cuban aristocrat.

A 1961 untitled painting may represent Lourdes' sexual trauma. The vivid blues, yellows, corals and oranges of Forest typify Lourdes' vibrant palette. Art critic Giuho Blanc calls her bold, broad strokes 'very striking and shocking (at first glance). You have to acclimatize yourself. i i 'i sit i vx )U6l I AN i Artist IAnd Hei SBemon i ARTIST From ID i- rejoinder.

Mental illness and cre-; tiyity may have a link, some say. Lourdes Gomez Franca 60 years old, born to paint, driven to paint knows her demon well. ichizophrenia. It has. over the years, inter- Lourdes at work on Forest at friend Pablo Cano's Miami home.

She paints at Pablo's house because the smell of the oil paints prevents her from using them in her room at The Pointe adult-care facility. The finished painting is above, at far left. LANNIS WATERS Staff Photographer upted her life and put her career hold. It has, in recent months, Ur .3 I a feet up a delicate balance: She heeds the artistic recognition that omes from selling her work, but i too much income could cost her the government money to pay for jier care. Her demon has sent her Jp the hospital, forced her onto tnedication, tampered with her in-, dependence, threatened her dream.

countless people with Oriental illness, Medicaid and Supplemental Security Insurance JSSI) can be vital financial props, paying for hospital bills, medication and daily living expenses. But 'government regulations limit an individual's income, often a of self-esteem. For Lourdes, it is her dream 'that matters most: an artist's jdream, of recognition. Lourdes wants craves is not too strong a word recognition Outside the small, tight-knit Cuban arts' community that already nows her w0rk, and loves it. She $eeks recognition beyond the Spanish-language reviews that, al-tnost invariably, refer to "una tra-eica historia tersonal" her 1 8 i cause when I got to her apartment, she was hearing voices," Pablo says.

"She thought she was being watched. She kept telling me to stay away from the windows." In stark contrast, her meticulous organization amazed him. She had lined up her medications, her Social Security card, a slip of paper bearing her doctor's name. But he could not persuade her to depart for the hospital. "She kept feeling she was forgetting something, but she wasn't.

It was in her mind. She would forget where her keys were. They were in her hand. Or her purse. She was hold LANNIS WATERSStaff Photographer Lourdes' close friend Pablo Cano has a significant artistic reputation of his own.

His work is shown at one of Miami's leading galleries. This photo depicts Lourdes' first communion in Havana in 1940. Lourdes' tragic childhood her mother was killed, her father died of tuberculosis may be partly to blame for her illness. personal story. She desires Recognition of a kind that, only a "few months ago, seemed taunt-' jngly and entirely within reach.

But that was before the crisis that plunged her into limbo. $chiz6phrenia can be like that, 4ike a sudden hairpin turn sub-'Verting a straightaway. She slid ipto profound depression. She made multiple phone calls ba-' nal ones, urgent ones to Pablo, i She wept uncontrollably. And, fi-; nally, she swallowed a batch of Cogentin and Haldol, the pills used to control her illness.

But the overdose wasn't fatal. It merely nauseated her, and she phoned Pablo to plead that he come and take her to the hospital. "It was very frightening, be- ing it. Finally, he persuaded her to go to Jackson Memorial Hospital, to the psych ward. She had been there before.

And, within weeks, she would go there again and, again, regain her fragile equilibrium. She would become, once more, the woman described by a friend as "tall, clear-eyed, silent, child-like almost in her shyness and lack of artificiality." Now the mundane confronts her: details, paper work, bureaucratic rules. After the crisis (she calls it a nervous breakdown), her doctors said she could not live alone any longer because, on her own, she often fails to take the daily dose of medicine that controls her illness. To pay for this newly circumscribed life, which includes her shared room and meals and supervision at The Pointe, an adult-care facility in Little Havana, she has applied for Medicaid and SSI. Receiving it would mean she cannot sell her paintings, not in any serious way.

Although Social Security regulations outline a transitional "plan for self-support," those familiar with the system say that, in reality, it rarely works for people with mental illness. To paint for herself, without selling her work, is unthinkable. An insult to her talent. A vacuum for her psyche. Money is validation in the world of art, just as it is in the world of medicine or law or commerce.

Money affixes value to an artist's work. Praise is welcome but, ultimately, sales are what count. And galleries would be loathe to display work they cannot sell. "If I can't paint, I will die," Lourdes says. It is that simple.

There is no doubting her sincerity. "That is the ultimate approval, the ultimate acceptance, for an artist," says Barbara Greene, a prestigious Miami art dealer who had begun to represent Lourdes in the months just before her crisis. "You can sit in your studio mistook her for a man and shot her. This is what Mario Franca knows for certain: Following Jose-fina's death, her husband's grief led him to neglect his health, and, by the time Lourdes was 5, he had contracted tuberculosis and entered a sanitorium. Lourdes remembers waving to him a tall, thin, gentle man with a long face, like hers from behind a low isolation wall.

Lourdes says she wrote to him daily. He died when she was 13, and her sister Sylvia 14. She can still recite the last words he uttered, like a macabre poem: "Me. muero, me muero, me mori I'm going to die, I'm going to die, I died." The loneliness is a part of her, nearly as tangible as her arms and legs, and Lourdes blames it for her illness. "Lourdes was always a very quiet girl," recalls her uncle Mario, "a very sad girl." The orphaned girls were reared by their grandmother and grandfather Porfirio Franca was a member of Cuba's Pentar-quia, a five-man interim government in I lavana's Vedado section, a wealthy neighborhood of large, handsome houses.

Two passions defined the young Lourdes: painting and religion. She began painting, encouraged by a nursery school teacher, before the age of 3. As she grew older, her devout Catholicism found an outlet in her drawings of the Madonna and child. She sometimes had to be prodded to paint anything else. By the 1950s, her work found an audience.

I lavana newspaper reviews praised her talent and reproduced the impressionistic paintings of her grandfather's house: Its marble floors, its high ceilings, its gracefully curving Please see ARTISTNext Page Pablo would recall that, while cleaning out Lourdes' kitchen cabinets, he found nearly a dozen vials of pills, some full. Clearly, she was not taking the drugs prescribed to control her sometimes-overwhelming depression. And Greene would remember being disturbed by a new painting: a pineapple, done in muddy shades of brown, totally unlike Lourdes' usually vibrant palette. "I was bothered by the picture," Greene says now. "Where did it come from?" Where indeed? Who knows the source of creativity? What miscue in the thought process leaches the trademark colors from an artist's work? Theories, possibilities, studies abound.

Research continues. One theory, although not specific to schizophrenia: The childhood loss of a parent, especially a mother, can lead to serious psychiatric problems including depression and thoughts of suicide years later. In retrospect, it was a perhaps the pivotal event in the life of Lourdes Gomez Franca: She was 10 months old when hoodlums forced their way into her grandfather's farmhouse, just south of Havana, and shot her mother through the liver. Josefina Franca, age 33, died within hours. "It was a very bad time in Cuba," recalls Mario Franca, Lourdes' uncle, who lives in Palm Springs.

"It was just after (President Gerardo) Machado left. A time of tumult My father had a lot of guns, but they were antiques. They didn't shoot. He brought them from Havana to the farm and buried them." This is Mario Franca's theory: The hoodlums "the banditos," he calls them must have heard about the guns and wanted them. They must have glimpsed his older sister through a window and, because of her height 5-feet-l 1 I really wanted to be out of Cuba.

I wanted to be -something in it A painting. needed to learn and work and work and work, but until someone writes a check, which says that they love the work and want to live with it, it doesn't mean much." The first time Greene saw Lourdes' work, nearly a decade ago, she was underwhelmed. Now she can't imagine why. "She had come to one of Pablo Cano's openings and handed me a bunch of photographs (of her paintings)," Greene remembers, "and I handed them back to her." Timing is everything, of course. Maybe those photos were the wrong photos.

Maybe Greene's attention was on the opening-night crowd ogling Pablo's work at the Coconut Grove art gallery she then owned. Whatever the reason, the next time was different. The next time, she spotted a painting at Pablo's house that made her gasp. It was a simple, blue cathedral that hung over his fireplace. It was Lourdes'.

"I couldn't get it out of my mind," says Greene. "I went straight to her apartment after that." Barbara Greene has 20 years' experience in the business of art, and enormous faith in her own instincts. Her instincts said yes about Lourdes and her paintings. "I showed them to people who were sensationally impressed," says Greene. Some of them were collectors, some art dealers.

Not everyone bought, but the response gave Lourdes optimism. Now, Greene wonderW the pressure was too much, if tne stress of having would-be buyers making yes-no decisions in her presence was bad for Lourdes. Especially with the ticking of the clock. On Feb. 15, Lourdes celebrated her 60th birthday.

But then celebrated may be an overstatement. "One of the things that Lourdes really wanted was to have an exhibition of her paintings, a retrospective, when she turned 60," Pablo Cano says. "It was a dream of hers." Pablo tried to ease her disappointment by hosting a party for her. It was nothing elaborate, just strawberry shortcake and a few friends. But Lourdes was not in a partying mood.

She was "hyper," Pablo says, and compulsively paced back and forth, room to room. So alarming was her behavior that he feared leaving her alone that night at her apartment: two sparsely-furnished rooms, her paintings hung floor-to-ceiling on every wall. Pablo sacked out on the living room floor and, in the morning, called his mother to come and take his place. By the time Margarita Cano arrived, Lourdes was confused, disoriented and about to wander into the street Margarita coaxed her back inside with a promise of cafe con leche, to soothe her. By the end of the day, she was at the Miami Mental Health Center.

Later, her friends and associates would realize that fey had seen the signs of trouble brewing: 1 mew tilings..