Cathy Curtis

Alive Still: Nell Blaine, American Painter

In 1959, Nell Blaine was thirty-seven years old—a rising painter in New York whose vibrant personality put her at the center of a group of notable artists and poets—when she sojourned in Greece and developed a severe strain of polio that nearly ended her life. Airlifted to New York, she spent months in an iron lung before emerging as a paraplegic. Deciding to focus on regaining her painting skills rather than trying to relearn how to walk, she became one of America's great watercolorists. Nell's post-polio life was made possible by the devotion of the two women who were (successively) her lovers and her fierce determination to succeed, despite the rigors and frustrations of spending her days in a wheelchair.