Helen Bickham

Helen Bickham was born on June 9, 1935, in Harbin, Manchuria at the time of Japanese occupation. Her mother, Nadezna Ivanofnof Rachoak, was from a mixed Ukrainian/Asian family, and her maternal grandfather worked for the Trans-Siberian Railroad. She and her mother had a difficult time adjusting to life in the United States. Her mother did not speak English and worked menial jobs such as sewing and housecleaning, socializing with other Euro-Asian refugees who spoke Russian. Caught between cultures as a child, she often found herself as a lonely observer, drawing what she saw as early as age six. She remembers that as a child, the other children would often ask her to draw things for them such as a “mommy” or a “doctor.” If they did not specify, she would draw figures without clothes, like paper dolls, to add them later, but this caused one of the mothers to call her a “degenerate.” While she was in elementary school in Virginia, she was often excused from class to draw murals in the hall, usually with themes such as Thanksgiving, done on butcher paper. She did not major in art, but she took an art appreciation class. This class had an assignment of creating a watercolor, and Bickham's desire to get the image just right caused the professor to comment that she was an artist. She married in the late fifties and had her first son, Geoffrey just before the family left for Europe. When she lived in Florence, Italy, she had a landlady was a painter. When she decided to live in Mexico, she was a single parent with one child who was ill and needed full-time care. She was not a privileged foreigner, but rather worked giving in English classes. She initially lived in a small town called San Lorenzo Acopilco located just west of Mexico City proper. It was difficult as the area was poor but she needed the peace and quiet it provided. She then moved to Mexico City because of the medical care that one of her sons needed. She became an English teacher in schools such as Garside and the Instituto Politecnico Nacional in Zacatenco. She says she has two great loves, people and nature. Bickham died on 30 September 2024, at the age of 89. ==Career==

Her first exhibition of her work was in 1963, but she considered her career to have begun in 1975 when she began painting full-time. Since then she has had seventy individual exhibitions and participated in over 300 collective ones, in Mexican cities such as Mexico City, Monterrey, Acapulco and Puerto Vallarta as well as in the United States, England, Scotland, Switzerland, Argentina, and Canada. Some of her more notable works include En el Jardín del Desierto, En su Mente, Hacia el Abismo, Llegando al Fin del Día, Cuatro Puntos and a series called Cacería en el Norte. ==Artistry==

Bickham has worked in a number of media including watercolor, oil, pencil, ink, lithography, engraving and paper embossing. She prefers medium to large size formats on canvas, fiberboard and museum board. She has also experimented with mixed media such as drawings over a wash and combining painting and drawing with embossing, such as with Palomas, where the doves are embossed on to the paper, flying away from the hands of a crouched woman who is drawn most exactly. She begins and erases and moves images around the canvas until she is satisfied. She considered all of her pieces to be works in progress as long as they are in her possession and for this reason does not date her work. The figures in her later work are more generic Westerners rather than Mexican but often the landscapes behind them remain Mexican. Her work has been compared to that of Diego Rivera, Rafael Coronel, and Marysole Wörner Baz. The focus of her work is not depicting persons or landscapes, but rather to be introspective. The people in her works are anonymous composites which appear in the foreground and other elements usually one or two landscapes, in the background. The people in a work can be a single man or woman, pair or small group of people as they work, play or just exist in a natural setting. There nothing out of the ordinary about the settings but often there is something about the expression or body posture which indicates some kind of tension. She states that her goal is to express the inner emotions people have while in common activities. She has described her work as a “window on an instant”. One example of this is En el Jardin del Desierto (In the Garden of the Desert), where a man and woman stand next to each other but separated by the large thorny leaves of the maguey plant, unable to relate Often, as with this painting, the subjects of the works gaze at the onlookers as if to start a dialogue. Her work is narrative although the story may not be clear. They usually relate to relationships, isolation, introspection and readjustment She states that the goal of many of the paintings is to show a crossing, either physically or spiritually to represent personal development. Her inspiration comes from observing people, when she can be struck by a look or movement of someone she feels has universal appeal. She has found this inspiration in various parts of Mexico, as well as Scotland and New York. Her paintings reflect her philosophical ideas from her life experiences such as travels, personal encounters, etc. She draws expressions to be understood universally, without cultural reference. “Human emotion crosses every frontier in the world.” said Bickham. “The human condition interests me. We all have such a such a hard time of it.” As human relationships change, she has experimented with diptychs and even triptychs, paintings the pieces so that they can be rearranged and still coincide, but in a different way. She has done some pieces in response to world events, such as the Bosnian War, the uprising in Chiapas and the murders of young women in Ciudad Júarez but does not believe in telling people how to interpret her work. She never paints violence or hate because she does not feel that they are fundamental to human nature, but rather aberrations. ==References==