This work is by Dee Segula.

“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 and inksand 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. .