She had recently turned 50 and her husband was dying of cancer. So Ann Huisman quit her day job as a graphics designer to care for him.
Life never unfolds precisely as we imagine it might. But despite the pain she was confronting at home, it was not nightmares that visited Huisman in her sleep; it was dreams of rubies — ruby rings she was compelled to choose at a jewelry store, rubies handed to her as gifts. For a woman who did not put much stock in fancy jewelry, the endless parade of rubies was baffling.
Research, she said, revealed to her the “old” meaning of rubies. In folklore, scripture, and mythology, rubies offer the restoration of one’s health, the restoration of life, the sheltering wings of angels.
The dream became manifest one day when Huisman wandered into an estate sale shop near her daughter’s home in a seaside Southern California town. She stumbled upon a gorgeous ruby ring with the Tree of Life carved into the stone. Intriguing as it was, she was put off by the price tag and walked out.
Though she didn’t know it at the time, Huisman’s visions of rubies would shepherd her through one of the most challenging chapters of her life and form the foundation for a transformative piece of art that she has finished in the past year, while battling cancer herself.
“Restoration,” as the painting is aptly titled, will be on exhibit throughout April at Truckee’s Riverside Studios in a pairing with the work of Susie Alexander, founder of the Arts in Wellness Studio, where Huisman found her expression on canvas following a devastating diagnosis of colon cancer.
Alexander had just opened her Truckee studio last August when Huisman appeared on her doorstep.
“It was serendipitous,” Alexander said. “I wanted art to be transformative, and I feel she came to the studio to really be alive.”
Huisman lost her husband to cancer in 2009, and when she was diagnosed three years later, she sold most everything she had at an estate sale, packed her remaining possessions in a small U-Haul trailer, and left San Diego County for Truckee, where her son lives with his wife.
A self-proclaimed “hippie” (her children are named Forrest and Sierra), she wanted to be closer to nature and the power of the mountains.
“There is something very magical about Truckee,” she said. “The people are just amazing. It’s almost a renaissance area in terms of awakening and recreation.”
Among the belongings in the U-Haul was an old drawing that had collected dust in her closet for years. In Truckee, she began working on it again.
Battling cancer and suffering through the devastation of chemo, Huisman took a brush to the template of her dreams, images of rubies and the Tree and Life and the restoration of the spirit that follows the path of hope. That painting, a beautiful representation of those visions, is “Restoration.”
“There is something that comes through when I do artwork that brings about a great healing,” she said in a Skype interview from Bulgaria, where healing has taken a new path. “You create things that you didn’t know you could create.”
Life unfolds, not perhaps along the path we expected of it, but beautifully.
Huisman’s paintings, including a collaborative piece she did with Susie Alexander, will be on display through the end of April at Riverside Studios, 10060 Donner Pass Rd., Truckee, (530) 587-3789, riversideartstudios.com
