The Diminishing World of the Aging Person: The Art of Elizabeth Layton

^ The Diminishing World of the Aging Person: The Art of Elizabeth Layton* William G. Bartholome That girl. Where is she? Lost in this bent old woman beat by years, who smiles —Elizabeth Layton, 1991 Elizabeth Layton began her work as an artist at the age of sixtyeight by taking a course in "contour drawing" at Ottawa University, a few miles from her home in Wellsville, Kansas. She had been born there, in 1909, into a newspaper family. After her father's death in 1942, she returned to her birthplace to raise her five children and became the managing editor of the Wellsville Globe, a position she held for fifteen years. Much of her adult life was spent in a never-ending battle with depression and the futile search for treatment; she tried every known psychiatric therapy, including a series of electroshock treatments that left her outwardly normal but inwardly in utter disarray. Her battle with depression reached its lowest point in 1976, when she was rocked by grief over the death of an adult son. Her powerful drawings, which began in the fall of 1977 with depictions of her grief and her struggle with depression, record the almost miraculous story of how she used art as an instrument of selftransformation and healing and "drew herself" into mental health. Her view of American life is one rarely reflected in contemporary art: aging, depression, dieting, marriage, grandmothering, illness, death, world hunger, the nuclear threat, capital punishment, the Equal Rights Amend- * Thanks to Don Lambert of Topeka, Kansas, for assisting me in selecting the drawings and providing these reproductions of Elizabeth Layton's work. Posters, lithographs, and a book about Layton are available through the Lawrence Arts Center, 9th and Vermont, Lawrence, Kansas 66044. 913-843-2787. Literature and Medicine 13, no. 1 (Spring 1994) 42—46 © 1994 by The Johns Hopkins University Press William G. Bartholome 43 ment, and the AIDS epidemic are only a few of her subjects. Her drawings are vortices into which she pulls the viewer with all the force that she herself experienced in the process of art making. What makes these images so powerful and often disturbing is that Layton chose herself as the subject of her work. The result is a haunting series of self-portraits—intensely personal works that nevertheless deal with universal subjects. She addresses her audience and invites them to see themselves through her own "looking glass."1 Layton also clearly was a devout practitioner of the contour method she had been taught, which demands that the artist "trace," without looking down at the paper, the contours of the subject. The theory is that not watching the drawing take shape on the paper opens channels of communication among the object, the artist's brain, and the drawing instrument. In January 1992 (a little over a year before her death on 15 March 1993), I requested Layton's assistance in preparing for a slide presentation of her work to honor her gift of a series of drawings for permanent display at the University of Kansas Medical Center. I had selected the theme for the presentation based both on the drawings themselves and on the agenda set by Daniel Callahan five years earlier in his provocative and controversial work, Setting Limits: Medical Goals in an Aging Society.2 Echoing earlier work, particularly that of Thomas R. Cole,3 Callahan argues that "the meaning and significance of old age must be a matter of open discussion and of an effort to shape some social agreement."4 It seemed to me that Layton's work was an ideal vehicle through which to explore the meaning and significance of aging. For the original presentation, she and I selected seventy-six drawings (from her corpus of some eight hundred drawings).5 Twelve of the drawings are reproduced here, along with short texts Layton had written to accompany them. Layton and I organized the drawings into seven themes of aging, beginning with drawings that illustrate a concern with aging and its meaning, including crisis-precipitating experiences of loss. For Layton this experience was the death of her son in 1976. Several of her early drawings depict her struggle to come...