Portraits of a sister's grief

The last time Julia Carpenter saw her sister, Amy, the usual tragedy intruded.

They had been apart a few years. Julia was back from Montana and headed for Italy to study painting. Amy arrived at Market East an hour late, her hair dyed florescent orange.

"She'd broken her glasses," Julia recalls. "She said she had to see the doctor. Her boyfriend was going to drive her. . . . It was all so surface, so, 'Hi, how are you doing?' 'Fine.'

"But she wasn't fine. Nothing was fine. Here I was her sister, and she'd never open up to tell me anything. You could tell something was wrong, but she wouldn't let you in on what it was."

Two months later, in April 2005, Julia was traveling by bus to Perugia, when her husband called with the news: Amy's boyfriend had found her on his Old City sofa. Amy Johnson had OD'd on cocaine at 24.

This is the story behind a series of giant oils that Julia Carpenter spent more than a year painting - nine faces of Amy, which chronicle a loved one's battle with addiction. Three of those faces will be on display in Washington this weekend at an exhibition on substance abuse sponsored by the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine.

What would make a woman spend 16 months deep in the well of her own grief?

"I wanted to reach out to those who had lost someone very important, because I felt very alone, and I thought they must feel very alone, too."

Maybe the project was a way for Julia to get to know her sister. Older by 12 years, Julia left Cheltenham for the Army when Amy was just 6. School in Wisconsin and Montana followed. Each time she would come home, she'd snap photographs of Amy, whose life kept turning worse.

Troubles in school. Fights with their mother. A series of affairs with older men who had habits themselves.

Kate Johnson tells of finding her daughter sitting on the curb at Kensington and Allegheny one night, lost inside a hooded sweatshirt. When Amy demanded money, her mother handed her $50, then watched her disappear into a building.

By the time of her death, Amy - who had spent time in prison, rehab and halfway houses - was making honors at Philadelphia Community College.

"She had this mask that she wore," says Julia, 37. "You didn't realize what was happening. She kept it so hidden. She was very good at that."

Working from photographs - many taken during their final meeting - Julia used bare hands, rags, her biggest brushes and a broom to wrestle Amy and her demons onto huge 5-by-4-foot canvases.

What surprised her, as she began the work that became her master's thesis, was how wildly her emotions swung - "sometimes very upset, sometimes happy to be painting, sometimes bored.

"My feelings were so erratic - it gave me a chance to think about who she was and who I thought she was."

The initial paintings are tightly controlled, even repressed. One called Goodbye reminds Julia of a Flemish painting - it is glazed, painstaking and exact. Raw and bruised, Autopsy radiates with anger Julia felt over the coroner's invasion of her sister's body.

The last pictures are looser. "I felt more comfortable letting things drip. It didn't have to be so perfect, because nothing really was."

In all of these images, online at www.juliacarpenterpaintings.com, Amy looks slightly off-camera, her eyes never meeting ours. The sisters do not connect.

What began as therapy for the artist has developed into something that reaches strangers. Dozens of addicts have written Julia after seeing the paintings exhibited in Montana. They write of the pain the images convey, and of how they help them see themselves through loved ones' eyes.

"It's a selfish procedure, painting," Julia says. "It's all about me. But my paintings, somehow, have touched other people."

Her mother, Kate, found the exhibit hard to look at - except for one image, of her grandson, now 8. He is Amy's boy and has Asperger's disorder, a mild form of autism. She says the painting captures his resemblance to his mother, but also his vibrant energy.

When Kate, a college English instructor who lives in Jenkintown, thinks of her lost daughter, she often returns to a story that troubled her in childhood - of a girl who had fallen down a well in Oklahoma, or Texas.

"It haunts me," she says. "You lose them. No matter how hard you reach for them, they just seem to be pulled farther and farther away."