People Beneath the Canvas

Yesterday—or perhaps during the night—Ali’s paintings unexpectedly returned to me. Perhaps because July 12 would have been my former husband Dick’s ninety-sixth birthday. Memory has its own mysterious rhythm. A single date can illuminate an entire landscape that had been quietly waiting in the shadows.

Whenever we visited Boston, we stayed at the Ritz-Carlton overlooking the Public Garden, at the corner of Arlington and Newbury Streets. Dick knew Boston intimately. Although he had built a successful business in California and moved comfortably in artistic circles, he never forgot where he came from. Raised in Chelsea, just across the Mystic River from Boston, he delighted in telling Bostonians he was from Chelsea rather than Boston, simply to watch their puzzled expressions. There was pride in those roots.

Newbury Street was lined with galleries, and one afternoon we wandered into one almost by accident.
There, hanging quietly on the walls, were paintings by an artist named Ali.
They were unlike any circus paintings I had ever seen. There were no cheering crowds or dazzling performances. Instead, the circus existed after the applause had faded. Performers practiced alone beneath impossible night skies. Tents glowed softly in empty fields. Figures waited, reflected, contemplated. The paintings spoke not of spectacle but of solitude.
I was immediately drawn to them, though at the time I did not fully understand why.
Only later did I realize that the answer lay in memories that had come before.

Years earlier, while living in Mexico with my second husband Jorge, I had come to know members of Circus Bell through mutual friends. Jorge and his friends had befriended a young trapeze artist whose career had ended after a terrible fall left her paralyzed. It was her courage that had first brought them together, and their friendship with the circus family continued for years.

Whenever Circus Bell came through town, we gathered to share meals and stories.

Their lives fascinated me. They traveled constantly, often performing outside Mexico. Because they could not easily return with cash, they came home carrying handcrafted objects they had collected abroad, selling them in Mexico to help finance the next journey. It was a simple, resourceful existence—always moving, always beginning again.
They spoke not of glamour but of work, family, endurance, and life on the road.
Without realizing it, they had already taught me to see the circus differently.
So when I later stood before Ali’s paintings in Boston, I wasn’t discovering an unfamiliar world. I was recognizing one. Ali had somehow painted what I had already come to know: the quiet dignity of lives lived beyond the spotlight.

That is why her work touched me so deeply.
I purchased a couple of her lithographs, and they remain among my favorite works of art. Not simply because of her remarkable technique—her luminous use of oil on velvet—but because she gave visual form to something I already carried within me.

Looking back now, I realize I wasn’t collecting prints.

I was collecting lives.

In recent years, I have begun to notice a pattern that had long escaped me. I thought I had spent my life following places—Lisbon, Paris, Samois-sur-Seine, Puerto Vallarta, Boston. But gradually another truth has emerged.

The places were never really the destination.

They were where I met the people.
Again and again I have found myself drawn to those who live quietly beyond the center of attention: circus families, wandering musicians, organ grinders, travelers, the man on the park bench whose story slowly unfolded over months of passing greetings.
Perhaps that is why Ali’s paintings still speak to me after all these years. She saw what I have always been searching for without fully knowing it myself—not fame or spectacle, but the quiet humanity waiting behind the curtain.
Sometimes our deepest themes do not announce themselves.
They simply accompany us through life, patiently waiting until one unexpected morning they step out of the shadows and into the light.