An Unfinished Canvas

In a white shed filled with memories, Bernarda Bryson Shahn is touching up a painting she started 20 years ago.

“When I finish it, I think I’m going to like it,” she says, staring at the canvas of a woman standing on Rome’s Appian Way.

In her spare time, she’s doing a little light reading: Hegel’s dialectic, a work she read in college but didn’t enjoy. She thought she’d give it another try.

Shahn, after all, hasn’t been to college for nearly 80 years. The widow of 1930s artist Ben Shahn forged an impressive career of her own: painting, completing public murals, illustrating books such as “Wuthering Heights.”

She turns 99 next month. And after all these years, she’s still curious and active enough to keep creating, even on a canvas she started decades earlier.

A retrospective of her work runs through March 8 at the Ben Shahn Gallery at William Paterson University in Wayne, N.J.

Sitting in a sun-filled room surrounded by her work, Shahn offers few secrets to her longevity.

“I drink wine and eat potatoes,” she says with a laugh. She thinks she has a happy disposition, but “if you think you’re going to live a happy life, forget it.”

Shahn is simply an artist, motivated by the images that pass before her eyes, and by her imagination. This has been her driving force as long as she can remember.

As a child in Athens, Ohio, her father would give her colored chalk. She used it to draw on the walls of her bedroom.

At night, she would go to sleep listening to her parents recounting Homer’s “Odyssey.” They would recite “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

The exploits she read about were fuel for her drawings.

She tries to explain her passion.

“It’s something that gets hold of you,” she says. “If you’re not doing it, you want to be doing it.”

After studying painting, printmaking and philosophy at Ohio State University, Shahn indulged in another passion--writing.

She wrote news articles on the arts for the Ohio State Journal and in the 1940s wrote and illustrated the children’s books “The Zoo of Zeus” and “Gilgamesh.”

Her artistry ranged from lithographs portraying the decline of the American frontier to the sketches illustrating Emily Bronte’s “Wuthering Heights,” and portraits of celebrities interviewed in Parade, Fortune and Scientific American.

She met Ben Shahn in 1932 while interviewing Diego Rivera in New York City, and they drove together across the country.

It was during their trip that Ben Shahn captured images of the Depression and collaborated on two murals, one of which was their hometown in Roosevelt.

From New Deal Utopia

to an Artists’ Colony

The community, named after former President Franklin D. Roosevelt, was one of several New Deal utopias founded by garment workers.

It later became a sort of artists’ colony.

Widowed since 1969, Shahn lives today with her granddaughter Amanda, also an artist, in the home she and her husband purchased. Their son Jonathan, a sculptor, lives next door.

Shahn is completely engaged in the world, eager to talk politics and art. She spends her days reading and working in the studio behind her home.

She walks without use of a cane. Little betrays her age, besides a hearing aid and an extraordinarily well-lined face.

Her work is still informed mostly by people’s day-to-day lives and hardships.

“I have always been aware of how people are living,” she says, leaning forward in her chair. “What are people being eaten up by?”

Besides the “unfinished” canvas of the woman in Rome, several drawings line the walls of her studio: politicians testifying during the Watergate hearings. Their hands cover their mouths. She plans to add Richard Nixon to complete the work.

At least 60 of Shahn’s works are on display at William Paterson. The art spans about 80 years and includes early etchings from the Depression and illustrations from her books.

Also included is a favorite of Nancy Einreinhofer, director of Shahn Gallery. “Passage” is a portrait of a female figure cloaked in a sheet, moving through a landscape.

“It’s somewhat anonymous, but moving forward,” Einreinhofer said.

She believes it is Shahn’s self-portrait.