Painting Herself Out of the Corner

DALLAS - Nancy Rebal was in her studio at her North Dallas home, painting the 12th Station of the Cross, "Jesus Dies on the Cross." Under the picture of the crucifixion is a Bible verse, Luke 22:42: "Not my will but yours be done."

The phone rang. It was her husband, Ron Rebal, a psychiatrist. He was at his office in Bedford, calling Nancy between patients. He said: "Well, it has gone to my spine. I've got to go. I just wanted you to know."

He hung up.

"I started screaming," Rebal says. "I threw the phone, and I said, 'Not your will be done this time! Not this time! No! No!'"

Ron Rebal's terse message meant he had lost. The doctors could do nothing to help him. The cancer that he had been fighting for more than a year was spreading and would kill him.

A long time before, Rebal had begun her five-year art project for St. Joseph Catholic Church in Richardson. First was the crucifix. It's 12 feet tall, its Christ about life-size. It's painted on wood in oil and gold leaf. Also in the scene are Saints Mary, John, Joseph and Francis of Assisi, "who popularized the idea of the crucifix," Rebal says.

Blood from Christ's wounds flows into chalices, symbolizing the Eucharist. There are other symbols. Rebal calls the crucifix "a visual teaching of the religion."

Her husband was healthy when she finished it. Then she began the smaller paintings - also in oil and gold leaf - of the 14 Stations of the Cross. She didn't paint them in sequence. She chose when she would do each, and when one was finished, the church's pastor, Monsignor Don Fischer, and the congregation hung it in its proper place and dedicated it with due ceremony.

Ron Rebal posed for several of the figures, just so his wife could get the body positions right, but some wound up resembling him.

"It's like writing your signature," she says. "You can try to make it different, but you can't really disguise it."

One of the men stripping Jesus of his clothing at the 10th Station looks especially like Dr. Rebal.

"Ron saw it," Rebal says. "I kind of apologized. He said, 'It's OK.'"

The project had been halfway complete when Rebal's cancer was diagnosed. Nancy was working on the first Station, "Jesus is condemned to death."

Almost five and a half years have passed since Ron Rebal's death. His children are grown. Veronica is 21 and about to graduate from Pomona College in California, where she has studied sociology and public policy analysis and Spanish. Brett, 24, earned a bachelor's degree in film from New York University and is in a two-year pre-med program at Columbia University. In May, he's going to work in an orphanage in India on an internship. Veronica and Brett were holding their father's hands when he died. They're ready to deal with the world.

Rebal's widow, now 53, is making a new life, too, one that still holds a strong memory of him and much grief, but nonetheless is liberating and fresh.

Not long ago, she sold the 5,000-square-foot North Dallas house where she and Ron had reared their children and where she painted the Stations of the Cross.

"Ron died there," she says. "We had a lot of pain in that house, a lot of sadness, and the place holds that. It had been a good family place, but now it was empty."

She sold nearly all the family possessions - "just junk, nothing very valuable" - and last July moved into a smaller place in Kessler Park. Its back yard is a steep grassy hill that drops toward woods and then to a small creek. Near the creek is a small structure that is Rebal's new studio.

She and a family friend of nearly 20 years, Dallas writer David Searcy (Ordinary Horror, Last Things), are a couple now. Throughout her husband's suffering, "David was a rock for us," Rebal says. "We leaned on him a lot."

Her new work is in another world from her earlier paintings, many of which were portraits of her husband and children. "As an artist with babies," she says, "I had to paint babies to be a serious artist. That was what was authentic."

Much of that work also is in Christian sanctuaries. But she doesn't define her spirituality in creedal terms. "I don't even want to put words on it. It's really that precious to me. I don't know anything about anything. I don't even want to. I don't have any answers. The more I feel it, the more I can't say anything. I can't join anybody. It has to do with me being a painter. "

Her new works are abstract, exploding with color and shadow, portrayals of a soul in motion. They're called Time Being One and Time Being Two and Moment and Generalities. The titles come to her while she's doing them.

"They're mythology," she says. "Not far from dreaming.

"Abstract painting used to be a subsidiary of my realistic painting," she says. "Figures were the subjects of my work, but there was always abstraction going on around them. In the abstractions, I was expressing something about the realistic figures, about their situations. When Ron died, I couldn't do figures anymore at all. They just disappeared. They've been completely replaced by abstractions to express the same things."

She's working inside a thesis, she says.

"It's a thesis without words, so I can't tell you what it is. But I can tell you what it's about. It's about moving to my place. It's about painting about me instead of painting about them. It's about me by myself. I've never been by myself."

Her largest new painting is "She saw that he was Beautiful." The canvas is 8 feet by 5 feet. It will be the title and centerpiece of an exhibit of Rebal's recent work from May 12 through June 17 at Craighead-Green Gallery on Dragon Street in the Design District. The show will be composed of 12 works, large to small, all abstract.

"I'm painting my heart out," she says. "I can't stop."

Rebal's father was a nomadic chamber of commerce executive. She grew up in Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Lowell, Mass., home of Jack Kerouac, Bette Davis and Ed McMahon. Her first painting lessons were in the house in Lowell where James McNeill Whistler was born. Her high school and college years were in Washington, D.C.

In 1974, she was earning her fine arts degree at American University, and Ron Rebal was finishing his medical degree at Georgetown. They met at a mutual friend's party.

"I sat next to him on the floor," she says. "He was controlling the record player. I could give back his one-liners as fast as he could give them to me. And my friend said, 'I think you've met your match, Ron.' He was from Long Beach, Calif., and he had a California accent back then. He sounded like one of the Beach Boys. He was cute. He was full of the dickens. He had a red VW Super Beetle convertible."

Rebal was planning to return to California for his internship, and as his relationship with Nancy deepened, he talked about her going with him. "He even wrote me a prescription: 'Must go to California with me.' My mother said, 'No, no, don't go. Doctors are terrible husbands.' She was a nurse. But I went."

Nancy was 23 when they married; Ron was 27. "He was from a different world from me. He had spent all those years in medical school. He was so smart. I loved his brain. We were very yin and yang. We knew entirely different things, but we were both willing to find out about the other person's world. He had never seen art museums. He came to love them."

Rebal did his internal medicine internship at a Veterans Administration hospital, then a residency in psychiatry at the University of Southern California, followed by a fellowship. Nancy worked at a design studio. They were eight years in California.

"I didn't love L.A.," she says. "I wanted to go back to D.C. We had a baby in 1981. The smog was terrible. I didn't want to raise a kid in that. I kept agitating to leave L.A. Well, Ron chose a job in Minot, North Dakota, like 50 miles south of the Canadian border.

"It was a hell of an adjustment," she says. "We went up there and smelled the clean air and admired the aurora borealis. But then we found out that all you can get is Wonder Bread, and the nearest city, Minneapolis, is 10 hours away. I was thinking, 'What did we do?' It was crazy."

Ron was director of a psychiatric hospital and one of the few psychiatrists in the state. "He had a lot of depressed farmers' wives," Nancy says. "The Indians in the area had a lot of problems. They needed him desperately. He was incredibly busy. I got pregnant with Veronica. I was lonely. I couldn't handle it."

After seven years of marriage, Nancy went home to Mom, in Denver.

"I just fled. I filed for divorce. But Ron wouldn't sign the papers. He said, 'What do I have to do to get you back?' I said, 'You have to change completely and move to Denver.' So I had Veronica by myself. I was alone. I had a toddler and a baby, and my mother broke her hip and had to move in with me.

"But Ron and I couldn't stay off the phone to each other. For three years, we lived separately, but he was down constantly, most weekends. Neither of us let go of the other."

Ron couldn't find a job in Denver.

"We were told that psychiatrists like to ski," Nancy says. "Denver has more psychiatrists per capita than any place we could try."

In 1987, Ron signed on with a private psychiatric group in Bedford, and the family moved to Texas. He specialized in child and adolescent psychiatry.

His practice prospered.

"He had an incredible number of patients," Rebal says. "He was a colorful character. As many people didn't like him as liked him. He was a strong personality. Ron was ridiculously healthy. He was a beautiful man physically. He was an obsessive worker, but so was I."

She earned two master's degrees from the University of Dallas. The prestigious Edith Baker Gallery in Dallas represented her. A number of personal and corporate collections around the country include her work. She designed stained-glass windows for three Episcopal churches in Dallas and Houston, and 33 windows for the Episcopal School of Dallas. She was doing the big project for St. Joseph Catholic Church.

Then the unraveling:

On a spring day in 1999, Rebal was riding his dirt bike in a park and took some crazy jumps and landed on his hip. "He was limping like crazy," Rebal says, "but he didn't pay much attention to it."

Three months later, on Father's Day, while he was moving some chairs in the living room, he screamed.

"It was a horrible scream," Rebal says. "His femur had sheared and gone into the socket. He couldn't move. An ambulance took him away. It was a terrible, terrible night."

The surgeon who pinned the femur together noticed an abnormal soft spot in the bone. Tests revealed osteosarcoma, a type of bone cancer that usually attacks teenagers.

"In September, his bone doctor said, 'I'm referring you to an oncologist.' And that's all he said. 'See you.'"

In November, after chemotherapy, the Rebals were told the cancer had spread to Ron's pelvis. In March came Ron's phone call to Nancy's studio. It was in the spine. In June, Ron went skin diving with Brett. In August, he collapsed.

"It was in his liver," Rebal says. "He was in such pain he couldn't stand up. That was it. Ron came home and was in hospice.

"He was a difficult man," she says. "We had a difficult marriage. He was brilliant and cantankerous and all these wonderful, terrible things. And he became the best of himself. It was incredible. The months with hospice were as sweet as could be."

Last Christmas Brett and Veronica came to their mother's Kessler Park house for the first time. Brett proposed a toast: "To a new home, and to Ron Rebal, who made it possible."

Nancy saw healing in the toast, a knitting together of the past and the new.

"I needed that so badly," she says. "I needed to know Brett and Veronica were going to be OK."

She says she's OK, too. Her painting has made her so.

"This is my time to produce in a quiet world," she says. "I'm living my dream life. It's purely happy and fulfilled. I can't quite believe it."

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FOR MORE INFORMATION:

NancyRebal.com: http://nancyrebal.com/

Craighead-Green gallery: http://www.craigheadgreen.com/home.htm

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(c) 2006, The Dallas Morning News. Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune News Service.