Filling the blank canvas

NICK EICHER, HOST: Today is Tuesday, October 10th. Thank you for turning to WORLD Radio to help start your day. Good morning. I’m Nick Eicher.

PAUL BUTLER, HOST: And I’m Paul Butler. Coming next on The World and Everything in It: blank canvases.

For an artist in Charlotte, North Carolina medical complications caused her to forget how to paint. To cope with that loss, she first had to learn to rely on her faith. WORLD reporter Jenny Rough has the story.

MARCY GREGG: Red is one of my favorite colors.

JENNY ROUGH, REPORTER: Marcy Gregg is standing next to one of her paintings, titled Perfectly Prepared. At six feet, it towers over her. It’s mostly blue, with brown, white, black, a patch of yellowish-green and of course red, strategically placed throughout.

GREGG: And red literally to me was the place that was going to kick your eye. So it goes from there to there to there to there.

Gregg is an abstract oil artist. In 1980, she graduated from Southern Methodist University with a double major in studio art and art history. She married her college sweetheart, Dev. And set aside her art to start a family. They had three kids. Two sons and one daughter.

But Gregg doesn’t remember any of that. Not her wedding. Not her pregnancies. Not a single thing she learned about art in college.

She does remember waking up in a hospital bed one day.

GREGG: I wake up and I remember I'm tied down so I can't really move. And I remember thinking, why am I here? What is going on?

She thought she was a 17-year-old freshman. She had no idea why she was in the hospital. No idea that, just days ago, she’d given birth to her daughter. Or that 36 hours later, doctors found her standing up in the hospital bed screaming.

GREGG: They thought I was having a psychosis initially. But then when they touched me, they realized I was burning up with fever. And by the time my husband got to the hospital, I had slipped into a coma.

IVs hung off her limbs. She was on a ventilator. Doctors drilled a hole in her skull to relieve the fluid buildup in her brain. Gregg was still unresponsive, but by then the doctors knew what she had.

GREGG: Pneumococcal bacterial spinal meningitis, which is the one that you die from.

Gregg says it’s a miracle she lived. But the illness did take a toll. When she woke up, the last 13 years of her life were gone.

GREGG: They're telling me that everything's going to be fine, that I have a husband and three children, and they're fine. And I'm like, whoa, whoa, whoa. You've got the wrong patient. I don't have a husband. I don't have children. I'm a 17-year-old.

Doctors said her memories would return soon, when her brain swelling went down. But they didn’t. When her husband walked in and tried to kiss her, she thought he was a doctor and pushed him away.

Thankfully, she had met Dev as a 17-year-old college freshman. So technically, she did remember him. Just not old-looking Dev. She remembered young-looking Dev.

GREGG: I didn't remember getting married to him. But the more I talked to him, the more I began to recognize that my Dev was in that man. That was my Dev.

And her kids? She was scared to “meet” them when they came to visit in the hospital.

GREGG: But when they walked in and they got on the bed and I touched them, I knew they were mine.

Back at home, she hoped familiar surroundings would trigger her memory. Nothing. Not family photographs. Not the clothes in her closet.

GREGG: My clothes, I hated. They looked old and I remember saying, who would wear these?

Every morning, she prayed God would bring her memory back. He didn’t.

When Gregg realized that she was probably never going to remember those lost years, she turned to alcohol. But one night, she understood something important. She wanted God—and His will for her life—even if that meant a life without her memories.

She started a 12-step program.

GREGG: I knew I was done. I was gonna trust him. Totally.

Soon after she quit drinking, she suddenly had a burning desire to paint. When she told Dev, he said, “Well, paint!”

GREGG: And I said, well, I need to take lessons. He said, “You don't need to take lessons. You majored in art in college.” I don't remember college.

She started with realism, but quickly turned to abstract.

GREGG: But then I kind of did things that were a little wonky. Like this?

She points to two half circles that kind of look like sideways mountains.

GREGG: I have a circle in every painting and it’s because in Christ we’re complete. Sometimes you can find them and sometimes you can’t.

Gregg credits God—and the prayers of her pastor and family—that she didn’t die of meningitis there in that hospital bed. And now, decades later, she expresses her faith in every piece of artwork she creates.

Gregg starts by painting a scripture verse on the canvas. You can’t see it when the painting is done. But she uses the verse to guide the composition and colors.

GREGG: So I, in the morning, will spend time with the Lord. And I read a passage, and whatever passage that morning really stands out to me. I will take that scripture into the studio.

Perfectly Prepared—the big abstract painting with splashes of red—was inspired by 1 Corinthians 2:9.

GREGG: Which says, “No eye has seen, no ear has heard, no mind can imagine what God has prepared for those that love him.”

No matter what she’s going through, she knows God has an eternal plan.

GREGG: And when I was painting, the whole thing I kept thinking was: I needed to make it so beautifully colorful and bright because I do believe that's what it will look like when we get there. But also how he prepares for us now.

This Thursday, Gregg will hold a solo exhibition at an art gallery in Charlotte, North Carolina, called Colors of Light. Her last one. It’s becoming too painful to paint. She’s hit another roadblock with her health: Rheumatoid arthritis.

But she’s come to terms with that. She points to a painting titled “Every Layer Matters” based on Romans 8:28: God works all things together for good.

GREGG: So if He's always at work, and He's working all things together for good. Then He’s going to finish the painting of your life. So I don't worry when I'm in a bad place because I know the next layer's coming.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Jenny Rough, in Charlotte, North Carolina.

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