Elizabeth Layton (1910-1993)

I was deeply depressed, but that was inside me. I didn’t like myself. I started drawing, and started liking myself better.

Christian Science Monitor, May 12, 1992

Elizabeth Layton’s story is both inspiring and provocative. A native of Wellsville, Kansas, she was the daughter of a newspaper publisher. After marrying, she gave birth to five children. She was a journalist and creative writer who, following her father’s death, served as the manager of the newspaper.

For a period of 30 years, Layton suffered from severe bouts of manic-depressive illness. No medical attention helped her. After the death of her youngest son in 1976, she spiraled into a crippling depression. But at her sister’s suggestion, she took a drawing course at the age of 68. "It was a desperate, last-ditch effort to bring a purpose to her older years," noted Don Lambert, her friend and publisher.

She learned about "blind contour drawing" (see below) and ran with it. Holding a small hand mirror, she produced numerous self-portraits in various incarnations as social activist, homemaker, mother, goddess, and other personas, both real and imagined. These pieces allowed her to relay her multifaceted sense of the comedic/tragic. She took on global issues such as AIDS, Alzheimer’s, censorship, hunger, and race.

Her supreme intelligence coupled with her latent talent gained her national recognition, and her work toured the country in nearly 200 towns and cities during the 1990s. Enthusiastically nicknamed “Grandma Moses on Tabasco sauce” by Hank Burchard in the Washington Post in 1992, Layton’s work candidly reflects the process of aging, without apology or disclaimer.

In essence, her willingness to reveal her true voice saved her life. In a 1992 article in USA TODAY by David Zimmerman, she denies understanding why her mental health was so dramatically affected by her artwork.

I don’t really have anything to say about what goes onto the paper… You don’t get any scientific proof with one person, but my theory is that what I do is draw my feelings as I see them in the mirror, from the eye through the brain and down the arm and out the hand.

Layton’s work was the opening exhibition in 1987 at the National Museum for Women in the Arts in Washington, and it was exhibited in the same year at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American Art. The majority of her work is housed in the collection of the Lawrence Arts Center in Lawrence, Kansas.

 

* Blind contour drawing involves fixing your eyes on the outline of the object and drawing a very slow, steady, continuous line without lifting the pencil from the paper.

(This profile will appear in Live and Learn: Expressive Drawing by Steven K. Aimone. Published by Lark Books/Sterling Publishing, to be released, fall 2009.)