MCS
Holly Mae has been diagnosed with MCS, multiple chemical sensitivity, “an immune- system disease which most typically affects the lungs, nervous system, digestive tract, and brain. It is caused by hypersensitivity to low-level exposures to chemicals and is precipitated by a single massive exposure or long-term low-level exposure to chemicals encountered in the workplace or at home.” (reference)

People with MCS have a heightened sensitivity to the chemicals and toxins that are present in the air, water and food around them. This sensitivity may develop overtime to the point that the person’s body will react violently to exposures normal people can tolerate. These exposures can trigger disabling health problems ranging from severe asthma or migraine to anaphylactic shock (MCS is related to what has become known as “Gulf War Syndrome”). As there is no known cure for MCS, the only available response is management.

Because of the high use of chemicals in even everyday products, people with MCS often become confined to their homes in order to avoid exposures. Thus, added to the physical ailments which afflict them can come loneliness and depression.

Holly Mae has had continuing problems over the years with chemicals, especially the thinners she uses with her medium of choice, oil paints. Over the years, she found herself going through various periods in which she was overcome with both physical and emotional problems. She had gone to a number of medical doctors, all unable to help her. They attempted to detoxify her body by giving her antibiotics, which only served to increase the toxins in her body. The simple truth was that her body had become so overloaded with chemicals and toxins that she simply could not deal with the chemicals she came into contact with in normal situations.

Despite increasing problems with chemicals, Holly Mae’s desire to paint, to explore and to expand, kept her active. It was this fall when she attended a seminar in Scottsdale that her health situation came to a critical point. Her reaction to the chemicals at the residency was so bad that she spent much of her time behind a gas mask.

 “I knew going to the workshop was a bad idea so I bought the gas mask. But I had received a scholarship and I wanted to paint.” Holly Mae’s body came back distressed from the massive exposure and she found she could no longer function in many normal situations. Now, she says, every time she has a major exposure she becomes very ill and loses the ability to eat a food group.

Because of the MCS, she can no longer descend from the relatively pure mountain air of her home to what she refers to as Smog Lake City. Recently she has even become homebound, in an attempt to be in a controlled environment where she can attempt to detoxify her body.


STRIPPING DOWN
Holly Mae’s life has become a process of stripping down. She has stripped down her travel, her social interactions, her menu. She has even stripped down her house, in an attempt to create a controlled environment. The carpet and paneling are gone but have yet to be replaced as the couple searches for non-toxic materials. One of Holly’s paintings, a wonderful freize-like arrangement of musicians painted on a thin, warm, pink background, hangs on bare wallboard.

Holly Mae’s artwork reflects the process that is going on in her life. When your life becomes so consumed with hidden chemicals and substances in the air to the point that you can’t have a friend in for a chat because they use drier sheets, or wear perfume, you can’t help but feel that influence in various aspects of daily life.

But not all the side effects of MCS are negative. Holly Mae is able to see positive things resulting from the changes in her life.

“If I can’t buy a new car, or I can’t buy new leather hot pants to go dancing in next week, and I’m stuck in this house, then the financial aspects of success go away . . .our need for income has dropped immensely.”

Her process of stripping down her life has also brought clarity to it.

“I am intensely interested in seeing what lies at the core of things in my life, be it beliefs, lifestyle, consumerism, relationships and my art. I want to see what things look like without the drama. I want to get rid of the things that aren’t truly needed in life. Be it perceptions I've adopted because of someone else’s opinions or a trinket that my friend gave me and I have kept out of guilt. If I can love and appreciate life in it’s simplest form then the rest is icing."
 

"I don’t like to clutter my artwork with deep meanings and cliché ideas, either. My artwork just is and because it is a product of me it reflects what is happening in my life. It is about showing people as simply as possible and still maintaining the essence of the person.”

This desire to show people in their essence has been developing in Holly Mae’s work over the past couple of years. It germinated at another workshop she attended, this one in Vermont in 2001. She remembers being filled with a huge desire to paint, to experiment, to expand at the workshop. She stretched a long canvas across the walls, completing 28 figure works in a month’s time, laying one down next to another on the long stretch of canvas.

It was also during this workshop that she began to feel released from some previous encumbrances. She recalls seeing the abstract work of Paul Russotto. She was not impressed by the work but decided to attend his workshop. The first slide of his she saw was an early self-portrait in charcoal, realistically rendered, that was so powerful she says she felt like crying. Afterward she talked with Russotto and asked him how he did it, how he broke free from such beautiful but realistic works to his mature abstract style. His response was, “I never said I wasn’t scared.”


“I think that liberated me,” Holly Mae says, “because when I think of letting go I feel scared and now I think it’s okay to go in that direction.” Her letting go first meant exploring portraiture and the figure. And within that subject matter it has meant a continual exploration of stylistic possibilities.

“I wanted to do portraits, but I didn’t know what was allowed.” She says that around the same time she attended the workshop she saw works by Modigliani, an artist whom she had never encountered despite four years of art history classes at the University. She saw an immediate affinity with her own work and a revelation of what portraits could be. “It helped me to see that it’s okay for me to let this part of me shine through.”

“I feel that anybody can take a class and learn how to paint and make it look like somebody, but to have something distorted, eyes one an inch higher than the other and still be able to catch the essence . . . I think that is what’s hard. So I’m looking for how simple I can make it and I think I keep pushing it to make it more simple.”