Deborah Kasman
About the artist:
Deborah Kasman is a family physician and mother of two teens. A practicing clinician and academic bioethicist, she works as a bioethics director for Kaiser Permanente in southern California. “Two-and-a-half years ago, I started painting to reconnect to my own soul, having gone through my own experience of trauma while raising a child with undiagnosed Asperger’s syndrome, who had uncontrollable rages. I paint by a method called Intuitive Painting, whose mantra is ‘the canvas can hold all of your feelings.’ “
About the artwork:
“I was in a painting class when Adam Lanza shot and killed twenty-six people, mostly children, in a Newtown, CT, elementary school. While our country mourned the loss of those individuals, I also mourned for Adam and his mother, whose deaths were tragic as well. My experience with my own family members who had suffered from mental illness gave me insight into Adam’s fear and angst. In ‘Bless Our Children,’ a woman sobs under a weeping willow tree in the rain. Guns are buried under the tree’s roots. Twenty-eight flowers circle the tree; twenty-eight stars hang in the sky. The deer, whose image came to me as I painted, is a ‘protector of the innocent.’ “
Visuals editor:
Justin Sanders
