Art Review: Images by survivors of cancer draw from joy in life : GoMemphis.com

One artist paints the world around her, capturing the wonders and beauty of nature through her brushstrokes. The other artist documents the world within, clicking away at the struggles and forces that press against the human experience.

Both are cancer survivors, and their work, different as it is, comes from a similar place: art as a forum for healing and witness to the preciousness of life.

Each artist -- Mary Lawrence Allen and Tawnee Cowan -- also has a show opening this week. "Celebrating Green: In Tune with Nature," which runs from Wednesday through Aug. 3, is a collection of more than 50 recent paintings and multi-media works by Allen at Memphis Botanic Garden, while a mini exhibition of photographs by Cowan can be seen tonight through July 23 at Jack Robinson Galleries.

Allen and Cowan further share a creativity that is largely self-taught -- the development of style and technique that can only come from the kind of personal discovery each has gone through.

Allen, 76, has taken art classes here and there since she started painting nearly 30 years ago, but she is always looking for new ways to express what she calls "the excitement going on in nature at all times -- nothing is passive or static, it's all active." To that end, she has used gold, silver and copper leaf, aluminum, Plexiglas and Mylar against more common art media such as acrylics and colored pencils. Her appropriation of nontraditional materials has even extended to nature itself.

"I decided to use the lichen on a piece of bark that was lying in my front yard," she says. "It became so beautiful to me that I coated these nature items with a gloss medium to make them preserved and incorporated them in shadow-boxed framing so that it's three-dimensional."

Acting as alchemist, Allen seems to render all back to Mother Earth, suggesting through the frequent insertion of precious metals in her art that nature and life are what is most precious. Notions of birth and rebirth in her colorful landscapes are also not lost on this five-time cancer survivor, who says she will donate exhibit proceeds after expenses to the Salvation Army's proposed Kroc Center at the Mid-South Fairgrounds.

Cowan, on the other hand, has been busy photographing herself and others affected by cancer. The former Seattle resident -- who blogs at The World Through a Faerie's Eyes -- spent 1988-1993 as an in-patient at St. Jude's. She started taking photographs five years ago as a way to deal with chronic pain after an SUV ran a stop sign, hit her car, and left her with a broken spine. Because of her chemotherapy history, she can't have surgery or take pain medication. Photography has instead become an alternate therapy.

"Every time I touch something, it interrupts the pain signal," says Cowan, 38, whose images of flowers radiate with a presence worthy of Robert Mapplethorpe. "And the world is so beautiful. Why not pick up the camera and capture the world? For the 20 I'm holding my camera and taking pictures of someone smiling or a flower, that's 20 minutes I'm not feeling pain."

Working in tandem with the Wings Cancer Foundation, a local nonprofit networking and assistance organization for victims and survivors of the disease, Cowan has been assembling portraits of people touched in some way by cancer. She shoots them all donned with wings -- reflecting not only the symbolic flight each has taken but the peer-to-peer connection of the Wings Cancer Foundation -- and intends to publish the results as a printed collection, Warriors in Wings, early next year.

The preview show includes a number of self-portraits plus several of Nashville photographer Chuck Jones, also a former St. Jude's patient. In one particularly strong image "Salvation," he holds a cross against his bare, weathered torso, looking vulnerable and yet transformed, poised in an act of spiritual defiance that seems to claim his cancer as much as it embraces faith.

While Jones is a cancer survivor, Cowan admits some of her other subjects might not be around to see the finished product. It has only made her more determined to finish.

"This book is their book," she says. "That's why its important to get this done."

"Celebrating Green: In Tune with Nature"

Newest art by Mary Lawrence Allen. On display from Wednesday through Aug. 3 at Memphis Botanic Garden, 750 Cherry. An opening reception is 5-7 p.m. Thursday. Call 636-4121 or go to memphisbotanicgarden.com.

Preview exhibit of photographs by Tawnee Cowan

On display at Jack Robinson Galleries, 44 Huling, through July 23. An opening reception is 6-9 p.m. tonight. Call 576-0708 or visit robinsonarchive.com.