This work is by Dee Segula.
https://youtu.be/BX2WIc3Wptg

“Dee Segula - 1”

Dee Segula earned her livelihood as a practicing artist. Her works were sold
across the country in high end specialty shops, galleries, and exhibits. Much of it
was three dimensional. She had woodworking, metal, and jewelry workshops in
her house. Some of the craftsmanly skills were passed down to her by her father.
She was as unique a human being as her artwork: kind and soft-spoken but
unsentimental ,especially when it came to herself or her artwork. Her colorful
works were inhabited by harlequins, jesters, jubilantly adorned women seeming
to be perpetually on their way to a masked ball. And the playful child within her
infatuated with patterns, especially the ubiquitous black and white tiled floors
stretching out into some distant forest, dreamscape, or towards the end, a
foreboding tempest.

She took two of my Year Long courses in the late 90s. There was a lot of talent in
that Michigan group. However, not only did she do every piece of homework
(almost impossible) but did it in her own uniquely identifiable style. She was
prolific. So it surprised us that on the day of the last class session she was not
there early as usual. Another student rushed into class and said that something
was wrong with Dee. She was in the parking lot gasping for air. That whole year
she had hidden from us that her lungs were failing. She would need a double lung
transplant.

I returned a few months later to attend the opening of the group’s exhibit. I visited
Dee at her home. She spent most of her time on the couch hooked up to an
oxygen tank. The thing that struck me the most, but didn't surprise me, was that
she was working. Dee was incessantly working. It was too much for her to deal
with messy paints, inks and pens, so she was producing work after work with
color pencils on cover weight, textured, black paper. She was still waiting for a
lung transplant, reflected in one of her works “The Wait”. She received the
transplant and kept battling different systemic failures. Even when the end was
drawing near she infused her energies into her artwork.

One of the last pieces she finished was her harlequin, reclined resolutely on the
black and white tiled floor, gently comforting-protecting the small, exhausted child
clutched to her breast, unflinchingly staring down the oncoming, devouring storm.an Caps was really important to me at the time, and I felt quite satisfied with the result.