Anne Strand was staring at a hole in her brain.
It had been months since the stroke — a stroke that landed in May of 2020, during the first chaotic days of the pandemic. Now, seated at Amen Clinics in Atlanta, Anne was studying a CT scan. And the image was clear: a black spot, floating amidst two gray lobes.
Anne faced a stark reality: at 82, if she ever hoped to do art, walk, or even speak again, then she needed to find a way to rewire her brain.
But don’t worry, while this story may be tough at times, it has a happy ending. And perhaps that’s because, for Anne, relearning was already a lifelong mission.
Two Buckets of Leftover Paint
Many years earlier, at age 4, Anne began taking crayons to the walls of her family’s house in rural Arkansas. Surprisingly, her parents were supportive. At 5, she found two buckets of leftover paint — one white, one red — mixed them together, and decided to turn the front porch pink.
A parent myself, I struggle to fathom how I would respond to a newly pink porch — we can assume it would involve lots of prayer, a few four-letter-words, and maybe a couple Xanax. Anne’s parents, however, are apparently awaiting sainthood — they encouraged her.
As Anne grew older, she found that, well…you can’t just keep painting porches pink. As we move into adulthood, the world demands something more serious, and we all have to part with our youthful exuberance.
But, Anne thought, perhaps we can find our way back.
A Second Naïveté
Thus began one of the defining stories of Anne’s life: reconnecting people with who they were as children. And Anne didn’t stop with her art: she has also been an Episcopal chaplain and, for 31 years, a psychotherapist. All three disciplines — art, religion, therapy — have taught her the same thing: people need more than the material world offers.
“These things reconnect us to who we all were as children, before we were socialized,” she said. “That feeling at our core, that we’ve lost something essential, is universal to the human experience. And if we can find our way back, then that’s how we reconnect — with ourselves, each other, and the divine.
“I like the way T.S. Eliot put it in ‘The Four Quartets’: We shall not cease from exploration / And the end of all our exploring / Will be to arrive where we started / And know the place for the first time.
“Art, religion, therapy — they all taught her the same thing: people need more than the material world offers.”
“The worst thing that can happen,” she said, “is for someone to feel unworthy of connection. We are all worthy of that.
So when she moved to Selma in 2014, Anne spent years transforming her home into an ever-growing studio and gallery dedicated to that mission: through art, helping people rediscover the parts of themselves that they have lost since childhood.
Of course, the stroke interrupted all of that…
A Visit to Selma’s “Painted Ladies”
In 2024, four years after her stroke, I visited Anne at her home and studio in Selma’s Fairoaks Square, a row of renovated, multicolored Victorian cottages blocks from the city’s famous Sturdivant Hall. It was impossible not to be reminded of the famous Painted Ladies in San Francisco, although Fairoaks offers a slimmed-down, quainter variety.
“The enormous, pierced canvas (“The Unveiling”) was completed in 1979, but Anne says that it took her over 60 years to understand it.”
Her house, situated at the end, is a home like no other. Her artwork, featured throughout the home, is accentuated by 12-foot ceilings, countless windows, and a professional gallerist’s touch. And the art itself is as varied as it is beautiful: quilts, reimagined through collage, with feminine eyes peering out; an enormous, pierced canvas completed in 1979 (“The Unveiling”) that Anne says took her over 60 years to understand; still lifes about which she laughs and says, “I keep those up just in case people wonder if I can actually draw.”
86 now, Anne told me that, frankly, she despaired after the stroke. It took time, therapy, and lots of meditation — and it’s still an uphill climb. “I didn’t get my brain back,” she said. “I can’t talk like I used to. I don’t remember things. My personality has changed: I’m not so much an extrovert anymore.”
Nevertheless, a month after her debilitating brush with death, Anne began creating art again — some of it featured throughout the home.
Painting the Whole House
Anne’s story is certainly one of resilience — of staying productive and kind, no matter what life offers. Of course, we can all draw lessons from that.
But, perhaps most pertinently: after 81 years, has it worked? Has Anne found a way back in time, past the stroke and the hard realities of 7 decades of adulthood, to the little girl who painted her parents’ porch a renegade pink?
Listen, perhaps I’m the wrong guy to ask: when it comes to art, we’ll be lucky if I can manage a discernible stick figure. Still…here’s my guess:
I don’t know, but I suspect so.
After all, her artwork now covers the entirety of her home — as if, at 86 and still recovering from her stroke, she picked up a paintbrush and thought to herself, “why stop with the porch?”
Check out Anne’s website.
Read about a bunch of Southern women artists, including Anne, in “Old Enough”.*
Paint your parents’ porch and post it to Facebook.
Share this with somebody in Selma on Instagram.
*If you buy through this link, then I do get a commission. It costs you nothing, I promise. But it does help support The Alabama Ramble’s work.
