Meeting Ella Peacock, Again
Catalyst Magazine
from Meeting Ella Peacock, Again
After keeping myself busy in her quiet house for my own long empty days, I was gaining a better understanding of her determination to do her “full-time job of looking” at the desert mountains as a diversion from her isolation. Perhaps it was that loneliness that encouraged her amazing capacity for work in Sanpete County where she painted in her car both during the hot summers and white winters. But I was beginning to see that she wasn’t really painting for the love of it alone. She was also working so hard from a long tradition of duty and from a genuine need to survive. I only then realized the quiet power in her paintings was not entirely a reflection of her unassuming personality; it replicated her inner solitude as well.
As I sat in her kitchen rereading her letters and my transcriptions of our conversations, I noticed how many times she had told me she didn’t think she would “make it through another winter,” how many times she asked me if I thought she “should move back east” again and how frequently she said she was “finished” with this life. I noticed how often she talked about money in her letters to Bailey, how fearful she was of depleting her savings account. Once she told him she had recently sold five paintings and said she was proud she was able to build her savings—and in a subsequent letter asked if he thought she had been boastful. It was probably in this silent kitchen she wrote those letters. Perhaps it wasn’t the cold of the winters as much as the quiet emptiness of the night she dreaded.