Art Unveiling at LLUMC Reveals a Lot About Art and Life

The formal unveiling of a triptych of oil paintings donated to the Zapara Rehabilitation Pavilion at Loma Linda University Medical Center's East Campus reveals as much about octogenarian artist Rhona Brandstater Hodgen’s philosophy of life and art as it does about the pictures on display. Though surrounded by approximately 40 admiring friends, family members and guests, Hodgen sits quietly, enjoying the attention with the unperturbed and serene gaze of a journeyman artist. In his introduction, Michael Jackson, MPH, the since-retired administrator of East Campus, emphasizes the importance of bringing the beauty of nature into the patient care environment. Art, he says, contributes to the creation of a healing environment that is beneficial to patients in the process of recovery. When Jackson finished, Murray Brandstater, MD, the director of physical medicine and rehabilitation at East Campus who is also the brother of the artist, presented an overview of Hodgen’s life. He explained that while oil painting has always been important to her, it had to compete with the demands of raising a family and maintaining an active career, which included stints as a medical technologist, university professor and piano teacher. Only in the last two years has she been able to devote her full attention to art. As the brief ceremony concluded, Hodgen smiled for pictures with friends and family members and hugged her 10-year-old granddaughter, Annie. “We paint together several hours a week,” she says with pride. “Annie’s quite the good artist!” The three-panel painting that is the subject of the unveiling, depicts the San Bernardino Mountains covered with snow. The peaks are fronted by a row of palm trees protruding above the foothills like the low notes of a musical scale. Working for two to three hours a day from photos and memory, Hodgen completed the paintings in just three weeks. As she talks, it becomes clear that she loves the art and craft of painting almost as much as the heroic landscapes she depicts. “How often do we see the mountains so covered with snow?” she asks. In discussing “the wonderful rows and tiers of palm trees,” she points out that the tree silhouettes give a solid support to the fantasy of the snowy mountains. "The layers of foreground, middle grounds and distance were interesting as far as color and shadows were concerned," she said. "I spent quite a lot of time matching colors and compositional elements from one painting to the adjacent one.” A plaque below the work suggests Hodgen takes her calling seriously. “Rhona Brandstater Hodgen (1926-),” the plaque begins, “has had a lifetime of interest in Music and Art. For over forty years, she has been a successful musician and painter. While traveling in Australia, Zimbabwe, South Africa and the United States, she remained active in these two life-enriching disciplines, which she believes give iconic meaning, inspiration and transcendence to the human spirit.” The plaque continues with her artist statement, offering a glimpse inside the psyche of this remarkably talented and singularly focused artist who — despite 83-plus years of age and a fungal disorder that makes it difficult to breathe — paints for several hours a week. “I like to work in oils,” she writes. “The smell and texture of the paints, the gestures of applying it with the varied softness and hardness of brushes and palette knives, the decision making related to value, composition and tone, the seeking out of harmonious subject matter —these are all challenging, joyful and healing to the spirit. I continuously find parallels between music and painting; concentration in either field can lead one into a dream-like state of suspension where time stands still and there is deep pleasure in just being.” A visit to her home opens the view wider onto the sources of her inspiration. After an introduction to Rhona’s husband, Maurice, brother Murray ushers the visitor into a living room filled with paintings by Hodgen, her friend and fellow painter Hugh Stevenson, and other artists. The works reflect a melding of styles, loosely blending impressionism with contemporary influences. Hodgen waits in the family room, tethered temporarily to the breathing tube that helps maintain aspiration when “my disease,” as she calls the fungus in her lungs, acts up. At other times, she’s fine without it for hours. The room throbs with color: pillows of blue, orange, and sage dance in chromatic ecstasy with red-orange poppies in a deep blue vase, orange and blue cups, a red canister, a large multi-colored platter in green, mustard, pink, orange and black — the room looks like a museum of bright and positive colors. A triptych of the Grand Canyon — companion piece to the images in the Zapara Pavilion — peers down from the wall. By sculpting the massive landforms in rich, sunset oranges with chasmic shadows in purple and blue, Hodgen has carved a one-dimensional masterpiece almost as 3-D as the canyon itself. The desire to create art never lapsed across eight busy decades of her life. All the years she was working in medical technology, picking up two master’s degrees in music, raising two children, putting her husband through school and teaching music, the art impulse kept surging through her veins. Now, with lots of time on her hands, she paints with passion and purpose “Beats playing bingo!” Hodgen laughs. After explaining that the location for an 11 x 14 water hole at a golf course is actually an abandoned rock quarry, she asks Murray to fetch a large painting of a jumbled mesa of boulders she painted en plein air in Zimbabwe in the 1960s. “The place is called Tomato Kopje,” she explains, “after the red color on the rocks. I can still feel the sunshine at my back.” But unless anyone should think of Hodgen as strictly a landscape painter, she rounds up nine small images of ice cream cones in elaborate square frames. “Maurice and I went to Baskin Robbins for ice cream,” she explains. “We took several pictures. My favorite flavor is caramel. Lemon is also wonderful.” She laughs at the whimsical source of her inspiration, admitting that the paintings do look good enough to eat, before turning serious. “You know,” she says, “if I had my life to live over, I’d get another MA; this time in art. When one is brave enough to do what they really want in life, finding the motivation to fulfill your dreams is no longer a problem.”