Paintings framed by mystery and grief

Suzy Shealy was one of those preppy Southern moms whose artistic streak found expression in what she calls “crafty-type things”: cross-stitched towels, Christmas ornaments, knitted scarves.

It was stuff to give away at school auctions or offer to neighbors, stuff with little hearts and frills, the comforting, precious visual language of mother-love.

Yet here she was on a balmy June afternoon, in a studio overlooking a yard full of petunias and marigolds, painting the kill-or-be-killed scowl of an American soldier patrolling the streets of Iraq.

Whish-whish went her brush, and as if by magic, the planes and angles of the soldier’s bones emerged from a light haze of grayish paint: gunmetal cheekbones and nostrils flared and fierce. She outlined the suggestion of a right arm, and a hand clutching an M-16 assault rifle.

The snapshot she painted from was attached to the canvas with a potato-chip-bag clip from her kitchen. In the photo, a second soldier hovered in the background, his torso emerging from a Humvee turret.

But Shealy will not paint her dead son. She is not ready.

“I’m just not,” she said. “I don’t know why.”

Some of Sgt. Joseph Derrick’s personal belongings were returned to his family in boxes. Some came back in little velvet jewelry bags with “United States Army” embossed in gold letters. His mother has kept nearly everything, no matter how trivial: the phone card he used to call her from Baghdad, his cellphone, his boot laces, his civilian clothes.

A mother learns that every one of her children has a signature scent. The old T-shirts and sweats still smell like her first child. She can still picture him the day he was born -- those perfect hands and perfect feet, those big blue eyes. How could she throw his things away?

Among the belongings that came back from Iraq was a tiny flash drive she had sent him as part of a care package. It returned to her filled with more than 500 photos. Some of them were taken by Joseph. Others were taken by his fellow soldiers.

Before Sept. 23, 2005 -- before the insurgent sniper fired the bullets that pierced his neck -- Joseph had told her about the pictures. He couldn’t wait, he had said, to come home and deliver the stories that the pictures promised.

But without their narrator, Shealy found that the photos amounted to a chain of riddles -- an eternally incomplete slide show.

She didn’t know what to do with the images. And yet she kept coming back to them, cycling through them on her laptop. The blurred street scenes, taken from a Humvee window. The anonymous, laughing Iraqi policemen her son had trained. The American soldiers trying to make phone calls home, hiding behind their warrior faces in the streets or mugging like boys from the relative safety of a barracks bunk.

There were enigmatic landmarks: concrete blocks and minarets. Captured ammunition lined up in the dust.

Eventually she decided she would paint them. Maybe she would even paint them all. Never mind that she knew little about oil on canvas. She would paint what the soldiers saw: this alien world of washed-out sand hues that she barely understood, this place so far from her comfortable South Carolina home. This last world her son would inhabit.

On that June afternoon, Shealy, 53, received a guest on her generous front porch, offering homemade sweet tea. A fan spun lazily overhead. Rangy and well-toned from tennis, she was dressed casually: a Ralph Lauren sailor shirt and gold-leaf earrings, pink nail polish and sensible sandals.

The death and the notification had come nearly three years earlier. But when she dredged them up from her memory, her voice began to wobble and crack, the prelude to a deeper, lupine yowl.

Her daughter Elizabeth, 22, trained her eyes on her mother and cried along with her, in a kind of awful duet. A breeze blew Shealy’s wind chimes gently into one another as she plowed through the details yet again:

“It was small-arms fire. . . . went into his neck and devastated his carotid artery. . . . Patterson pulled him under the vehicle so they wouldn’t shoot him anymore. . . . They cracked open his chest. . . . and he was two weeks from coming home.”

Shealy grew up comfortably middle-class, with seven years of piano lessons. Her grandfather had been an artist and a jazz musician, and something of a layabout. Her mother said: better to major in business and help run the family’s fast-food franchises.

Shealy was a sorority sister at the University of South Carolina whose most rebellious act was playing too much bridge. Joseph was the product of her first marriage -- a failed one -- just after college.

He would soon have a loving stepfather, a younger brother and sister, and a big house in the suburbs of Columbia. He would play army in the creeks and culverts with a neighbor named Johnny. When he didn’t have a toy gun, he would pick up a stick.

Joseph grew up strong and sturdy, athletic and amiable and funny. But he neglected his grades. In class, he threw spitballs and talked back. After eighth grade, the Shealys sat him down at the kitchen table and told him he would spend his freshman year of high school at Marion Military Institute, in Alabama.

“He didn’t put up a fuss,” Shealy recalled. “He just said, ‘OK.’ ”

At Marion, his grades improved. He was captain of the football and basketball teams. Two years after graduation, he and old friend Johnny decided to enlist in the South Carolina National Guard as military police.

It was not what his mother expected.

“I remember crying for weeks,” she recalled. “I said, ‘Please -- you could get hurt.’ But he was an adult, and he decided that was what he was going to do.”

The twin towers fell in 2001. He signed up for the regular Army. He went to South Korea, Tikrit, Baghdad.

Shealy received the Army’s phone call while she was driving around Columbia in her convertible. Military officers had tried to visit in person, but she had moved and they didn’t have her new address. Her husband, Cary, stopped the car and put the top up to muffle the screams. Joseph was 25 years old.

His body came back nine days later. Then the boxes and bags arrived from Baghdad. The cute plush toys she had sent in all of those care packages. His toothbrush. His dress blues. His Game Boy.

And the flash drive.

Some days she didn’t leave the house. Some days she still can’t.

She had her family and she had her church. But she couldn’t go back to her place in the choir for fear of blubbering through the songs. At the grocery store, she was met by the consoling and curious. It was at times unbearable.

Six months after the funeral, she picked up the paintbrushes. She was inspired by a church friend who mostly produced bright canvases full of flowers: “Happy, happy, happy,” Shealy said.

She joined an informal ladies’ painting class and learned the basics. She learned that you start with darks and work your way up to light. She learned that no mistake is permanent. On canvas, unlike in life, everything can be undone by turpentine.

She set up an easel in her kitchen and painted after making dinner and washing dishes. The feel of the smooth, cool paint seemed therapeutic. Her first canvas was a small one: “The Night Watch.” The photo she painted from showed two soldiers in silhouette, with a helicopter and the moon suspended in the night sky.

“When my son was in Iraq, I’d look at the moon every evening,” Shealy said. “Even though Joseph was half a world away, I knew he looked at the same moon. After we lost him, I’d look at the moon and say, ‘Lord, please give my son a hug for me.’ ”

The next photo she chose was of a giant mosque rising out of the dirt. A soldier she knew who had been to Iraq told her it was in Mosul.

The first painting had taken a few days, but this one took four months. She fretted over the details of the minarets and domes and arched windows. Sometimes she would lose herself in its symmetry. Sometimes she cried with the brush in her hand, staring at an image that could only tell her so much.

“I don’t know why he kept it,” Shealy said. “He was supposed to tell me.”

She chose the images with an eye to what her emerging skills could manage, but also from instinct. She painted a photo of a barren Iraqi market stall. A woman in a black abaya gives a forlorn stare. A young man walks by in the foreground, seemingly uninterested. When the bleakness of the scene began to disturb her, she painted a basket of red apples for him to carry.

She began painting the soldiers who had served with Joseph. She called for their permission. She painted a soldier named Chris Woo as he sat on a curb, working the buttons of his cellphone, a plastic water bottle lying nearby.

She painted an image from another stash of photos that are even harder for her to look at. They are from Joseph’s memorial service in Iraq, full of grieving soldiers who needed to deal with it and get back to work. She painted a soldier named Plato, who knelt in grief, clutching Joseph’s dog tags.

Shealy felt herself improving. She took some lessons with Michael Del Priore, a portraitist she had commissioned years before to paint Joseph as a young boy. She made prints and offered them for sale on the Internet ( www.suzyshealy.com), dedicating the proceeds to charity.

Last November, the Shealys met with President Bush in a private affair at Ft. Jackson. He said he took responsibility for Joseph’s death and told them that history would show he had done the right thing.

Shealy gives him credit for meeting them face to face.

“I know he believes in his heart what he told us,” she said.

She gave him two prints. He said he would hang them in his library.

The originals, six of them, remain in her house. Her first, the tiny “Night Watch” painting, blends unobtrusively with the decor of her dining room. Upstairs, the paintings are larger and set a more assertive tone. The painting of Plato hangs in the room that is overwhelmed by Joseph’s possessions and mementos of his service.

Others, more jarringly, share a second guest bedroom with a collection of porcelain dolls.

The shape and tone of Shealy’s new piece is just beginning to emerge. The soldier in it is Spc. Arledi Jones. He has since suffered back injuries related to an IED attack and is recuperating at Ft. Hood, in Texas.

Jones, 26, was touched that Shealy would paint him. He remembers the photo and the circumstances of the moment: They were clearing a road of improvised explosive devices. It was not a good day.

“There were a lot of Iraqis looking at us,” he said. “Kids were throwing things at us. I was really aggravated.”

The painting could take Shealy weeks or months. She is getting out more these days. She will head to the South Carolina coast soon with her husband. She is learning to play Joseph’s cello, which he gave up for baseball at age 13.

She knows, however, that she will return to the cache of photos. The project, like her grief, adheres to no timetable.

“I think it will just go on as long as I’m able to do it,” she said. “If there’s an end to it, I don’t know when or where that will be.”

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richard.fausset@latimes.com