The top of Jeanna Hasan’s worktable out on her sun porch is filled with paintbrushes, small tempera bottles stacked on top of each other, and several drinking glasses full of water. Popsicle sticks used to mix paint sit in another glass, and a bottle painted with angels lies in the middle of the table on top of newspapers. Within easy reach are two cigarette lighters and an ashtray brimming with butts.
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Painted on the bottles are a Muslim father, mother, and infant seated near a brick wall, their heads and bodies wrapped in white cloth; an Ethiopian family strolling along the coast; a Mexican man painting the seashore near a cabana; a woman hanging clothes on a clothesline while children play on swings; an Indonesian woman dressed in a purple gown holding purple fans. Hasan points out her favorite bottle, which depicts a market scene in Peru with villagers in straw hats shopping at a vegetable stand.
“I painted flowers on them, but I didn’t like that. So I tried animals, then people–and liked that much better,” she says. “It’s like therapy for me. I have a lot of nervous energy. I have to stay busy. After I put out dinner and clean the dishes, what else is there?
She sits smoking for a while, waiting for the paint to dry. Then she picks up her brush, and the white blobs slowly become angels, the rocks a mountain. Other rocks become a cave that the angels are standing near.
Hasan has never been to most of the places she paints, and she says the scenes sometimes come from magazine or television images. “I never know what they’re going to be. I just start painting. I feel my hand move, then I say ‘Oooh, that’s pretty.’”
