Vancouver artist left legacy for both science and the arts

Anne Adams’ legacy lives on

Vancouver artist Anne Adams, who died a year ago of a rare brain disease, left a remarkable legacy to both science and the arts.

Clinical monitoring of the progression of the disease that caused her death – Frontotemporal dementia (FTD) – has provided scientists with hitherto unknown details of how the brain changes during this form of dementia and produces spurts of artistic activity.

Adams was a former UBC scientist who abandoned the microscope in 1986 for an artist’s palate and produced more than 1,000 paintings, including the seminal Unravelling Bolero.

She was one of the founders of Artists in Our Midst, which is now an annual event in Vancouver, where hundreds of local artists exhibit their work in various community centres. This began 16 years ago when Adams and her artist friend Pnina Granirer put their works on show at the Aberthau Community Centre in Point Grey and invited other artists to join them.

Adams and her family became aware there was something wrong with her in 2000, and by 2004 the disease had progressed until it took away her ability to speak properly or even add up simple numbers – a shock to her husband, Robert Adams, a UBC emeritus professor of mathematics.

“She was always strong in mathematics yet she reached the point where she was unable to add up simple numbers,” Robert said.

But while she lost those faculties because of the damage being done to one part of her brain, her brain was rewiring itself with another part taking over, allowing her artistic creativity to flourish, according to a study done by staff at the Memory and Aging Centre at the University of California, San Francisco.

“While the left-hand side of her brain was deteriorating the right hand side was growing,” said Robert.

During 2004, Anne painted some of her most vibrant and detailed works, including pictures of two houses in the Belgian town of Ghent and a house in Amsterdam.

Robert said that prior to Anne being diagnosed in 2002 with primary progressive aphasia, of which FTD is a variation, she had developed acoustic neuroma – a tumor attached to the acoustic nerve.

It proved benign, but it was constantly monitored by scans. When her FTD was diagnosed, doctors were then able to look at those early scans to compare changes in her brain, said Robert.

“The people looking at the acoustic neuroma weren’t dealing with dementia, but in 2004 when we went to the Memory and Aging Centre in San Francisco under Dr. Bruce Miller, the changes were apparent,” he said.

Her commitment to art began in 1986 when the couple’s 17-year-old son Alex was hurt in a car accident and was not expected to live.

“He was expected to die, but he made a miraculous recovery and was back to school again in no time, so she decided to concentrate on her art,” said Robert.

She would work from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. in her studio and turned out a remarkable number of works covering many topics, from a set of 32 painting of buildings at UBC, to paintings of homes and stores on Vancouver’s west side, an ABC Book of Invertebrates, biological works of flowers and weeds and many whimsical pieces.

She never exhibited in a gallery but sold her paintings from exhibits in cafes around Vancouver or from her growing reputation as an artist, which led to her receiving numerous commissions, said Robert.

But it was her fascination with Maurice Ravel’s Bolero that caught the attention of the neurological team in San Francisco.

Ravel himself is thought to have had FTD and the team believed that both he and Anne were in the early stages of the disease when he composed Bolero – his most famous work – and she painted a stylized version of his repetitious and hypnotic notes as they build to a crescendo and collapse.

Anne’s work is done on two panels which measure three feet by two and is a bar-by-bar analysis of the Bolero, said Robert.

It’s painted in electrifying colours and contains hundreds of small rectangles, each representing a bar with angular lines and curves inside representing loudness and bass, and colour being used to signify pitch.

The paintings hung in their home and Robert would play a game with guests in which he would remove the title of the work and ask them to guess which piece of music it represented.

“One person got it right,” he said.

“It was only after Anne died that we realized that Ravel had died of the same thing,” he said.

The paper was published in the neurology journal Brain in December 2007.

As for Unravelling Bolero, it was sold to Miller and is now in San Francisco, said Robert.

Her paintings tend to be happy and colourful and many people who bought her work have told Robert that they still find joy in them.

“That’s quite a legacy,” he said.

The last painting she was able to finish was of the houses on the canal in Ghent.

“Her style of doing buildings had changed. It has a certain atmosphere about it which grabs you. She painted it from a photograph I took when we were there in 2002. It’s something I will never sell.”