Daniel Rubin: Art forged in the crucible of cancer

Four years after surgery, Janice Hayes-Cha was ready for her self-portrait. She asked her daughter, Joanie, to take a picture, and tried to look as serious as possible.

Then Hayes-Cha sketched herself as she remembered having been.

"It was easy," she says. "I just didn't draw the hair."

Her face was gaunt then, her coloring washed away.

That called for a certain hue of greeting card. Hayes-Cha works in highly personal mixed media, expressing what she sees through a collage of cut-up best wishes that people sent her when she was sick.

Since cancer, the message has been the medium.

From a distance, her first self-portrait presents a somber visage. The eyes grab you first, sad and inward-looking. Up close, handwritten notes reveal themselves in fragments, phrases such as "love to all" and "happier days" spliced with the faces of angels and the Virgin Mary.

She completed that first post-cancer portrait at the Cheltenham Arts Center last summer, a few months after moving to Elkins Park from Boston, where she'd lived almost all her 48 years.

And as soon as the work was done, she began working on a sequel. That's because the first one had frightened her.

"I said, 'I'd better tell the end of the story, how I feel now, which is healthy and peaceful and not anxious.' "

She talked one morning last week from her third-floor studio, putting off for the moment the finishing touches required for a depiction of City Hall that she will enter in an exhibition about Philadelphia architecture.

She has adorned the building with images of women: Billie Holiday, Marian Anderson, Rebecca Gratz, then the faces of a Korean woman and an American Indian woman she found on greeting cards. Venus, not Billy Penn, reigns from above.

"I was thinking of all the women in the background, making this city great, raising kids."

In Boston, Hayes-Cha was executive director of an institute for Alzheimer's and Parkinson's disease research at Massachusetts General Hospital. When her husband, Jang-Ho Cha, became clinical director of Merck, she decided to spend her time raising their four school-age children and making art.

She had painted and drawn while growing up in Weymouth, Mass., then put down her pencils and paintbrushes when she went off to Mount Holyoke College. After her first marriage ended and her 30s approached, she started taking art classes again.

In August 2005, she was diagnosed with breast cancer. Colon cancer followed. While recovering from her latest surgery, she switched from watercolors to mixed media, inspired by an orange daisy her boss sent to the hospital. The piece hangs in her living room.

Now, working with a mothers' art cooperative called Mama Cita, she turns out one collage a month. You can see two of her creations at the Fairmount Park Welcome Center on JFK Plaza in Center City. They are the only pieces in the exhibit where bridges bear not graffiti but Hallmark greetings.

Her method requires her to look at her subjects like paint-by-numbers schemes, sectioning planes of color into irregular shards.

"It's something like a weather map with bands of temperature," she said. "I guess I think of it as the shapes of the puzzle."

Then she rifles her bag of greeting cards, which are sorted according to hue. She'll cut a piece and place it on the canvas to see how it looks. She often stops to reread what she's about to rend.

"It's very fun for me to flip through the cards and really think about the people who sent them. Cutting and pasting is more fun for me than painting. It's less filled with angst. Especially with watercolors, you can't go back if you make a mistake. This way, I just rip stuff out and keep working on it."

An 8-by-10-inch work might require gluing 800 pieces into place.

Hayes-Cha finds it strange that cancer turned out to have provoked her art.

"I'd been determined not to learn anything from having cancer," she said. She hated those saccharin made-for-TV movies about stricken people. "People expect you to have a life-altering experience that will teach you something. You'll become a better person. More saintly.

"I felt I already had the life I wanted. All I wanted was to just have my life. I thought it was bad luck and I needed to get well."

That was nearly six years ago.

"I realize my ability to do this art is really the gift from this. Having all this love, seeing all those cards, it allowed me to get to a different place in art. I would have never gotten there."