Chris Smith: Sebastopol artist gives away paintings to thank nurses, caregivers

West Sonoma County artist Carole Watanabe is no longer dying. She’s decided to go on giving away some of her paintings, even so.

About seven months ago, the ebullient and effusive Watanabe, 74, felt faint and short of breath during a spin class, and again shortly afterward at her art oasis of a country home on Sebastopol’s western edge.

Tests brought a diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, a serious condition that disrupts blood flow to the lungs and can lead to heart failure. Watanabe tells of learning that she had perhaps two years to live.

“I thought I was a goner,” she said from beside her easel and alongside her fish pond, behind her large red, round eyeglasses and beneath her broad-brimmed red hat.

The internationally collected artist began to consider preparing for death by giving away the art she hadn’t sold. But giving it to whom?

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THE ANSWER CAME to her when, a couple of months following the terminal diagnosis, her husband Don Watanabe took a fall at home. The musician and architect hit his head hard on a concrete floor and spent eight days at Santa Rosa Memorial Hospital.

His wife was awed by the care he received at the dawn of the COVID-19 crisis. Carole Watanabe resolved that she would give paintings to nurses and other members of the medical staff at Memorial.

“They’re the ones,” she said, “who are really doing the hard work and putting themselves at risk caring for everyone.”

Meanwhile, Watanabe worked on healing herself. She took on a full compliment of all that she believes can restore health: natural foods, the making of art, meditation, trust in the power to self-heal.

She recalls well the day her doctor revealed she no longer has pulmonary hypertension.

Watanabe’s remarkable life has included scratching out a living on a 1960s Mendocino County hippie settlement inhabited also by a young Dr. Dean Edell, opening the nation’s first fiber-art gallery, studying in Japan, painting and conducting art workshops every year at her and husband’s 400-year-old house in the south of France, and recovering from the devastating effects of the Lyme disease that’s now controlled but still wears on her.

Today she’s feeling confident that her life isn’t concluding any time soon.

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TO BACK OUT of her plan, born of a terminal diagnosis, to give away paintings would have been understandable.

Watanabe didn’t do that. Instead, she resolved to create eight new paintings in eight weeks, expressly as gifts of gratitude for caregivers at Memorial Hospital. She’d normally receive about $1,500 apiece for them.

She wrote to the people at Memorial, “I know the healing power of being surrounded by beautiful art and at this unusual time it felt like I wanted to uplift people’s spirits with random acts of kindness.”

As Watanabe started work on the paintings, a random drawing of names at Memorial determined which nurses and other patient-care workers will receive her artwork. Since then, some superbly happy scenes have played out at the hospital as staffers eye the vibrantly colorful, joyous canvases they get to take home.

“That’s the role of the artist,” said the very much alive Watanabe, “to make people feel better.”

You can reach Staff Writer Chris Smith at 707-521-5211 and chris.smith@pressdemocrat.com.