Gay - Nickle to many - trained as an art teacher but worked mainly in the film business doing art design, decoration, sculpture and shopping for movie sets and TV ads.
In 1991, age 35, she noticed weakening that was vaguely diagnosed as something like ALS, a disease that causes muscles to waste away.
As she lost the ability to draw and paint with physical pencils and brushes, she began doing art digitally with programs like Photoshop, which is how she made this show. She wasn't interested so much in the complex special effects available in digital art, she just wanted to draw and paint.
Even with digital tools the process was extraordinarily difficult. To move the computer mouse she drew with she had to move her whole upper body. Yet this was her most productive time artistically. "It's a paradox that the less easily I can do it the more I am driven to it as an avenue of expression. Although I’m still annoyed about being disabled, it has made me do things I might not have done otherwise."
The show got front-page coverage in Utah's two largest papers and sold a lot of prints. Gay was encouraged and intended to design a website for the prints. That didn't happen, she died a few months later. 24 years later there's still interest, so here it is. Most of it isn't this talky, the images are the thing.
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This site should work on all platforms (hopefully), but a screen big enough to show the prints at roughly actual size will look best. The size they appear on your screen may vary according to window size, zoom factor, etc. They were designed to be printed small - this was one of the larger ones at 3-3/4 x 5". Matted and framed for the show it was 11-1/2 x 13-1/2", so there was a lot of white space. You can replicate that look by viewing them in a large window.
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One focus of the show was the body, hers and others'. There was an element of what might now be called body positivity, along with grief and frustration. ALS made her very thin. She hadn't been very plump before but, as she put it, "I ... like drawing large women and, stuck now in this skinny body, long for fatness. However, I've also begun to make images which explore my extreme thinness. Drawing my own body somehow reacquaints me with it in its new state. It also helps me see it as more beautiful."
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Gay often experimented with different balances of competing qualities: rawness vs refinement, simplicity vs detail, pure line vs color, negative feelings vs positive. The drafts below illustrate a typical process, spread out over nine months, during which she also worked on other pieces. (The dates are the creation and last modification dates of the digital files.)
The earliest saved draft of this piece was rough, she was smoothing it out. After that draft the figure was placed off-center to suggest motion through the frame.
Not pleased, she went back to a rougher draft as the basis for later versions.
She tried colors, even flirted with balls in the air, an idea she had already used in another print. Which may be one reason she didn't use it here. She liked variety, the prints (and even the many other pieces she did digitally) are remarkably varied in ideas, colors, etc.
The final version at the top of this page returns to the simple line drawing - and fixes that one long finger that had persisted through many revisions - she must have liked something about it. There are all sorts of slips in the prints. She could have fixed them all with enough time, but she had to prioritize, and they're mostly not that noticeable. In some cases she liked the slips, and she liked the idea of the "Persian flaw."
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Neither fat nor ballerina, Gay still identified with this piece. She chose it for her headstone - no doubt causing confusion in the cemetery.
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The "Next" button below (click on the hand) takes you to another piece from the show. The buttons will take you through the whole show. After that, other digital pieces she did, mostly unfinished, are shown in groups.
Parents may want to be aware that like many art exhibits, this one has nudes in it.
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