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Constable: Artist relearns how to paint, with the opposite hand, after stroke

There is a beauty in the art of Georgia Pirron's past.

“The fur-traders - oh, they were fun to make,” the 87-year-old woman says, her joy evident in her smile and twinkling blue eyes. Near the end of the last century, Pirron made dolls representing people from rugged fur traders to glamorous socialites. She'd sew tiny outfits, fashion colorful hats and make sure a pearl on a purse matched those on the shoes. She learned to paint porcelain faces, and flowers on china plates and tea sets. She made jewelry. She put oil paintings on canvas.

Then came Pirron's heart surgery in 2006, followed by a stroke affecting her right side.

“I thought I could never paint again. I just had to give it up for 10 years,” says Pirron from a chair in her one-room apartment in the Plum Creek Supportive Living complex in Rolling Meadows. Life without her art was boring.

“One day I thought maybe I should try to paint something. I was so desperate. I said, 'God, help me. I want to learn to paint again,'” Pirron says. “And God said, 'Yes.'”

There is a different beauty in the art of Pirron's paintings today. They come from her heart, even if she has to improvise to get them out.

“I was right-handed, but I have to paint with my left hand now, which is very difficult,” she says, noting numbness caused by her diabetes also creates a challenge. “I drop the brush and I have to do it over a lot of times.”

But she's managed to produce a dozen pieces of art.

“Every painting has a story,” she says.

  Inspired by the true story of an Illinois woman who posed as a man to fight in the Civil War, Georgia Pirron painted this picture. Pirron, 87, taught herself to paint left-handed after a stroke affected her right side. Steve Lundy/slundy@dailyherald.com

One shows a man standing in a ring as a horse rears and a crowd watches. It appears as if that man is about to tame that wild horse.

“He lives here,” Pirron says of the man in her painting. “He sits and eats at my table. He does a lot of good for people. So I thought I'd put him in a painting.”

  When she started painting again a decade after a debilitating stroke, Georgia Pirron of Rolling Meadows often included a tribute to someone she admires. The main dancer in this painting is a woman who waits tables at the Plum Creek Supportive Living complex, where Pirron had lived. Steve Lundy/slundy@dailyherald.com

Another painting of Native Americans wearing colorful garb and dancing in a circle features a woman who waits tables in the cafeteria. “I hope she won't be mad that I made her into an Indian dancer,” Pirron says.

She got the inspiration for her bold painting of a volcano eruption from the news. “I watch TV and I look for a painting,” she says.

  Inspiration for this painting came from watching TV news reports about volcano eruptions, says Georgia Pirron, an 87-year-old Rolling Meadows woman who taught herself to paint left-handed a decade after a stroke affected her right side. Steve Lundy/slundy@dailyherald.com

“That's people going to buy their Christmas tree,” she says of one festive painting.

Widowed in 1982, when her husband Ernest died at age 52 from complications of diabetes and heart issues, Pirron made her living as a cook at the Great Lakes Naval Station, an office complex in Palatine, a public school in Niles and the Zenith plant in Elk Grove Village, and for the priests at Villa Redeemer in Glenview until her stroke in 2006.

She did her first paintings to protest the Vietnam War. “I was so against it, I started painting pictures of war,” she says. “It was just so wrong. We lost more than 50,000 and lots of them were friends of mine.”

One of her most memorable pre-stroke paintings is of a veteran kneeling to pay respects at the Vietnam Wall. “I was there when he went there, and I went home and painted,” Pirron says.

Horrified by the lives lost during the Vietnam War, Georgia Pirron painted a soldier paying respects at the Vietnam Wall. Years later she had a stroke and give up painting for a decade until she taught herself to paint with her left hand. Courtesy of Georgia Pirron Family

One post-stroke painting that tugs at the heartstrings is of a cement finisher. “He's coming home from work, all dirty, and he stops to pick a rose for his wife,” she says, explaining how her husband was a fifth-generation cement finisher.

“It was like I was possessed by God. I was so grateful,” Pirron says of her ability to paint again. “It may not be professional for everyone else, but I could get a lot of things in the paint that I always wanted to do. They are not 100 percent, but I like them.”

The mother of daughters Cathy, Eileen and Jessy and sons Michael and the late Daniel, grandmother of 10 and great-grandmother of 13, Pirron has supportive family members who had worked to schedule an art show of her paintings that had to be canceled due to a new health issue that has Pirron pondering a long-term care facility. Relatives now are hoping the artist starts painting again and follows the advice she gave others about how her paintings should inspire people, especially those who are ill or disabled, to try something creative.

“People think they can't paint again. I'm going to show them that they can,” Pirron says. “When they see my paintings, they'll know they can. That makes me happy.”

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