“I got this from doing the two things I love best—painting and golfing,” she said. “I call it ‘trigger finger lock down.’”

The condition, for which she has had previous surgery on other fingers, causes the fingers to curl inward. She doesn’t let the surgery hamper her work schedule and devotes several hours a day in her loft studio overlooking the Tennessee River. Because of the open design of the house, she gets both northern and southern sun exposure through two large Palladian windows .

Marilyn attended a one-room country school in Michigan, as so many of her generation did in rural areas of the state. She began “town school” – in Clio, Mich., – in the seventh grade.

“I saw Dick for the first time when I was in the seventh grade,” she recalled. “After graduation, we each went to different colleges. I was at the University of Michigan and he was at Kalamazoo (Western Michigan) when he called me and asked me to come over to his school for an event. I rode the train over.”

The couple has two grown sons and two grandsons. Tragedy struck the family last year when their daughter-in-law, Kathy Bachelor, 47, was killed in an automobile accident in Lawrence County in August.

“We were really close,” said Marilyn. “Her own mother died when she was just 3.”

Celebrations of life

Marilyn’s paintings can best be characterized as a celebration of life in their rich, vibrant colors and textures. Whether abstract, still life, landscape or architectural, her paintings draw the viewer in. In the mixed-media works, she might stretch surgical gauze across the painting, paint over it, and remove it for the netting pattern. Or else she might leave the gauze in place for a textured look. The gauze can become a fisherman’s net, a part of plant life or whatever the viewer sees in that particular painting.

Marilyn also uses her other love, golf, as the inspiration for many of her light-hearted works. Golf balls placed in different situations, take on a life of their own and express political statements or states of mind or stages of life.

She has had the golf ball images, each captured in individual frames, copied to coffee mugs that she sells at craft shows but not fine art shows.

Many of the works she will exhibit in Fairhope are her representations of memories from a recent trip to Europe. The Italian gardens are especially vibrant.

She is fortunate to be able to paint for two weeks each summer on Mackinac Island with her other mentor, Helga Flowers.

Marilyn’s work can also be seen at McGraw’s Coffee House in Florence and she also exhibits at the Arts Alive show in Florence.