When the Thomas fire tore through Ventura County in late 2017, it incinerated most of Alice Matzkin’s life’s work. Around 100 of her paintings that were stored in a shed outside her home were lost, including several family pictures and a series of portraits of older people that formed a body of work and a book, “The Art of Aging.”
It was a devastating loss, but the Ojai artist took it in stride. “It was shocking, but there was nothing I could do,” she tells me from her art-filled home. “I could either go bang my head against the wall and scream and cry and go nuts, or just say: ‘It happened. Thank God the house didn’t burn down.’”
“My other thought was, ‘Well, when we’re dead, the kids won’t have to worry about what to do with all these paintings.’”
Her sanguine — and mischievously macabre — response belies the fact that the fire, coupled with the long years of the COVID-19 pandemic, caused an extended fallow period during which she completely stopped creating art.
It was a striking pause after a long, successful career as a portrait artist. Her painting of Chelsea Clinton hung in the White House during Bill Clinton’s tenure, and her depictions of Betty Friedan, who wrote “The Feminine Mystique,” and potter Beatrice Wood have been featured in the National Portrait Gallery. (Her work on aging was even the subject of an Oprah segment in 2001.)
Then one day, some two years ago, she heard a voice in her head while sweeping the floor, telling her: “Go to the studio and don’t worry about what you’re going to do. Just go do something.”
Many of her supplies were cindered, but she found some black charcoal paper and pastels and “started doing these bizarre drawings, like stream-of-consciousness stuff.” She “just couldn’t stop doing them” and completed eight in a period of a few days, before graduating to larger abstract paintings on bigger canvases. She’s now finished 55, several of which are on display at the Farmer and the Cook cafe and market in Ojai.
Matzkin, 85, went through an earlier creative hiatus while she was raising kids from a previous marriage. Then, at 33, she met her current partner, Richard Matzkin — an author, jazz drummer and sculptor whose own work focuses on male aging.
Matzkin says their union rekindled their creative sparks after decades of not painting or sculpting. “Being together woke up our art,” she says. “Our love inspired us to go back to work.”
“We fell in love the first time we went out, on the Santa Monica Freeway,” Matzkin says. “I was driving my little car and he took my hand and said, ‘You’re so beautiful.’ … I’m sitting there looking at this guy and I’m like, ‘This guy is so cute.’” Soon they were making out in a parking lot. (“I don’t make out in parking lots; this was an exception.”)
Since then, the couple have lived in a single-story Ojai home for 33 years, filling it with memories and mementos, including several Buddha statues from their travels. A shelf in their airy studio discreetly catalogs her career highlights: faded photographs with Hillary Clinton and Wood; a copy of the “Who’s Who in American Art” that features Matzkin; a group family photo at the Smithsonian.
Sculptures by Richard Matzkin, 82, take up one corner, but the majority of the studio walls are reserved for her artworks. Portraits of older family members dominate, including several deathbed scenes: Matzkin and her mother, and a close-up of Richard Matzkin’s Aunt Kitty with eyes closed and mouth open.
Aging has been a cornerstone of Matzkin’s work for decades. “I looked in the mirror at 58, and I started noticing that these wrinkles are really starting to show up,” she recalls. “I looked outside and saw that everything was dying: Trees are dying, flowers are dying … everything dies, except maybe plastic. Everything’s got a cycle, including me. And then I went, ‘Wait, this is crazy to think that way … afraid that I’m going to drop dead … Might as well enjoy life.’”
She began interviewing women over 70, asking what makes life worthwhile, and painting their portraits. Many posed naked, proving that “every age has its beauty.” Looking back decades later, she says she’s grateful for being able to work through her fears with her art.
“I’m not afraid to die,” she insists. “I’m just so grateful for my life. I look at myself and every wart and these arms that look like lizard arms … All I did was go to bed at night and wake up and there was another wrinkle on that face. What can you do? It’s part of the beauty and accepting it is much easier.”
Wood was 105 and still throwing pots on her wheel when she was portrayed for the project, reminding Matzkin that “the well of creativity never runs dry.” It’s been overflowing in her studio lately, and the bright, abstract creations here testify to her new found creative energy — a drive that sees her working in the studio from dawn to dusk, apparently, and often forgetting to eat. “I’m sitting here painting away like a maniac,” she admits.
If she starts to see an image appear, she flips the canvas before continuing “and it’s a whole new thing.” The works, which she describes as bizarre and wild and “totally not boring,” can be rotated and displayed four different ways.
“If you really stare at them, you’ll find all kinds of imagery,” she says. “I see things in them that I didn’t see when I was painting.” Bursting forth, for me at least, are birds of paradise, galaxies, floating stairways, even an octopus.
Now the town’s artsy community — and visitors — can see them up close. Was it nerve-racking to stage a new exhibition? “At first I was thinking, ‘Golly, this is going to be a challenge,’” she replies. “Then I realized it was just my ego speaking, and it had nothing to do with the actual art, you know, worrying about what somebody thinks. It doesn’t really matter because the truth is, you can’t please everybody.”
“It’s so precious, to put good vibes out in the world,” she adds. “My paintings feel like good vibes. Somebody else might run out screaming if they see it, but you know, what can you do? Our intention in life is to bring love into the world.”
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