Rising up from ashes: Joanne Merrick

Life isn’t always easy. The key is “plugging through and going forward and finding those bright spots of life to start over again and take the experience you already have and develop it and keep going,” said MHCC artist Joanne Merrick.

Merrick is a returning student at MHCC. “I came here in 1968, and there were wonderful teachers here,” she said. When she was attending Mt. Hood the first time, she took art classes from Howard Neufeld, an instructor who influenced her deeply. “He just encouraged me and was wonderful.” Merrick believes MHCC needs instructors like Neufeld who will inspire and promote students.

Recently meeting with Neufeld, Merrick learned he had a terrible car crash in which he had his (dominant) art hand paralyzed.

This touched Merrick as she, too, has been through great hardships.

Throughout life she has been overseas, back East, to California, and New York.

She left an abusive marriage in New York, having to move from a safe house back to Oregon. On her “way out” Merrick lost her mother and experienced the betrayal of close ones. “My so-called friend decided to get rid of all my belongings,” she explained. Her ex-friend enlisted the help of Merrick’s own daughter when the “purge” happened, she said.

“I kept telling them ‘This is like you’re cutting my life away piece by piece,’ ” said the artist.

Twenty-thousand dollars of merchandise was given away during the purge, along with many of Merrick’s personal artworks and family heirlooms. “It was done very cruel(ly), and I was in a very depressive state, so I thought my best bet to get refocused was to go back to school,” she explained.

Coming back to school, Merrick started with sculpture, having lost most of her previous sculptures. “I was hoping to find new life, beginning, and joy,” she said. Instead, her  enthusiastic effort “was met with a lot of negativity and a lot of telling me I couldn’t do things I knew I could do.”

Though she had troubles in her sculpting course she also received help from Jen Fuller. Merrick credited Fuller in having tuly helped her finish one of her sculptures.

Merrick would take two terms of sculpture class simply to exploit her passion for the art, which she said she enjoys most of all the mediums.

Silk painting, silk screening, airbrushing, stone sculpting, glass working, watercolors, and oils are some of the other mediums she has used. When she was using oils it was “years ago when the turpentines were really potent.” So much so, she had “just about killed (myself) painting with oils in a small cottage,” she recalled with a laugh.

Now, as it was then, Merrick still “keeps plugging through” and stays positive. She hopes to be a part of the upcoming Mt. Hood student art show, set to begin May 9.

In the future, she wants once again have a studio where she can busy herself with sculpture, among other mediums.

Advocate Staff