Multiple Talents : Laguna Beach Artist in Wheelchair Sees Her Work Exhibited in New York

Taffy Besley, a Laguna Beach artist, was working one day with clay, her favorite medium, when she felt her first ominous pain: a kind of shooting numbness from the feet to the waist. That was about 14 years ago in Seattle, and she was working part time in a ceramics factory when it hit. The sensation puzzled and frightened her, so she went to a neurologist who, in the most passionless manner, informed her that she probably had multiple sclerosis. “Just off the top of his head,” the artist recalled, “he said, ‘Oh. I think it must be MS.’ ”

The pronouncement was accurate. On a visit to New York last week, the 43-year-old artist sat recumbent in her wheelchair and remembered it with amazement, but no malice. What was there to be bitter about? She gazed up at her drawings, hanging on the walls of a posh Manhattan art gallery. “It’s funny,” she said. “MS makes you appreciate life more. I don’t think I’ve ever been quite so happy.”

Besley is one of 23 North American artists, all with MS, whose work was chosen out of 123 submissions for inclusion in this year’s “Project Rembrandt,” an annual juried art exhibit sponsored by the National Multiple Sclerosis Society.

It opened this week at the IBM Gallery of Science and Art, where it continues through June 3 (after that, it will tour to other cities including Boston; Dayton, Ohio, and Durham, N.C.). Although in many ways it was much like any other art opening, with white wine and lofty conversation flowing, there were some differences.

First, there was a preponderance of wheelchairs. MS, which attacks the myelin sheath surrounding the central nervous system, frequently makes it tough for

sufferers to get around. And there was, perhaps, more curiosity than usual about the artists’ lives, so palpable with physical suffering and its accompanying emotional strain. So Besley was prodded to explain her happiness, under the circumstances.

“It sounds corny,” she said, “but if your choices are limited and you come to accept them, you say, ‘My gosh, what I have is really good.’ For me, just deciding that painting was what I was going to do . . . “ She didn’t quite finish the thought, perhaps because the decision to paint had been so arduous. It arose out of a difficult odyssey, one that began in Australia, where she was born.

She was 18 when she entered art school in Brisbane, thinking she wanted to become a painter. But in her first year, she discovered something better suited to her temperament, something she found far more exhilarating: clay. “It was so magical, the moment I saw it,” she recalled. “It’s such a physical thing.” “

She was so taken with the medium that when she found a pottery teacher she admired, she was ready to follow him halfway around the world--even if it meant moving to Southern California, which she detested: “I’d been to America on a trip with my family and I thought L.A. was the ugliest place. But I was just thinking about the work. . . . I was pretty one-eyed about it.”

So she arrived at Scripps College in Claremont and, after making “a fragile living” as a potter, she began doing more and more sculpture, making ends meet with “all sorts of baby-sitting.” There was a marriage, a divorce, and, in 1975, a temporary move to Seattle--then those shooting pains, that numbness, that neurologist.

“It was pretty hard to handle. I knew about MS and how awful it was.” But like many of America’s 250,000 MS sufferers, her first response was denial. “Frankly, I just didn’t think it would get bad. I thought that happened to other people and not me. So I just did all that I wanted to do: I went to graduate school in Claremont and studied clay.” Soon she was teaching evening courses in ceramics at Cal State Fullerton and it was there she met Jerry Rothman, an art professor who became her second husband.

And then, in 1985, she began to feel a fiery new pain in the lower parts of her legs. Her thoughts were affected, too: sometimes, she found, she couldn’t think straight, or hold a normal conversation. The physical exhilaration that clay had always produced in her was dashed; the dust in the studio choked her. It might have been a dreadful defeat. But something happened: Besley started to draw.

She began to produce intricate, colorful and intensely personal self-portraits, “a kind of storybook about what I’m going through.” Symbols emerged from who knew where, “from a part of me that isn’t censored at all.”

Her favorite, “A Talk With My Rabbit,” even surprised her. “I don’t know why I did it,” she said. “I have no idea.” She drew herself with a “weird frumpy, lumpy body,” nose-to-nose with a rabbit, which she recognized immediately as a symbol for motherhood, the pair of them commiserating over Besley’s childlessness.

As she sat contemplating her artwork and what it represented, she was not optimistic about its commercial potential. “It’s very hard to sell things that you’ve put your life and soul into. . . . They’re very personal,” she said, “and sometimes I think people don’t like the subject matter.”

But she was not at all gloomy. She talked cheerfully about her daily routine in Laguna Beach, about painting upstairs in her house, meditating for several hours each day and, best of all, having picnics on the beach in February, when she thinks California is at its best.

She spoke of learning portraiture as a way of producing salable art. “If I get out of the wheelchair, I can do it,” she said, “and if I don’t get out of the wheelchair--I can still do it.”

But there was a surprise waiting for Besley as she wheeled herself around the gallery, chatting with other artists and accepting compliments gracefully: Less than three hours after the exhibit opened, “A Talk With My Rabbit” sold for $400.