On a warm day in June, Doris Lubell sat on the back porch of her house in Edgartown. A few feet behind her, a hummingbird buzzed into view, drank from a glass feeder, then disappeared. Lubell, ninety-three, moves slowly now. But her mind is as alive as the ruby-throated blurs that dart around her yard. 

Lubell is my great-aunt – my late father’s brother’s wife’s mother, to be precise. But this story isn’t about my connection to her. In fact, I hadn’t heard some of the details of her life until that day on the porch. Instead, this is a story about a woman who knew from a young age that she was called to be an artist but was told to be good and be quiet, so she did what she was told – until she found her way back to that inner voice, got to work, and never stopped.

That persistence and commitment to her art eventually led to recognition of her talent. Works in her two primary mediums – pen-and-ink drawings and oil paintings – have been housed in museums throughout the country, including the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, and New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art and Guggenheim Museum. But, to Lubell, the true reward has always been in finding ways to express herself through her work. “It’s this constant struggle to get to a place of joy and beauty,” she said. That struggle began as soon as she started to reach for it.

Lubell grew up on the sixth floor of a public housing building in the Bronx. One day, when she was in second grade, she was sitting at her desk when the teacher asked a question and expected the class to parrot back an answer they had all memorized. “What is a snowflake made of?” the teacher asked. Nearly everyone raised their hand, ready to recite, except for Lubell. 

The teacher called on her anyway. Lubell knew the answer she was supposed to give, but she didn’t say it. At first, she said nothing. “I remember the silence,” Lubell said. “I looked out of the window, and I said, ‘You know, snowflakes are made of white clouds, falling slowly to the ground.’ Well, the teacher became apoplectic,” she said. Unimpressed with Lubell’s attempt at creativity, she brought her to the principal’s office.

The teacher told the principal that Lubell was “being purposely insubordinate,” she recounted. “And so, that night, what did I learn? Well, I looked up the word insubordinate,” she said. “And then I learned throughout my schooling not to be creative and different.” 

This message was reinforced elsewhere. “It was knocked out of me in many ways. Even at home I wasn’t supposed to be an artist,” she said. She was supposed to be a psychologist, like her sister. In an effort to please her parents, Lubell studied psychology at Brooklyn College in New York.

While in school, she met David Lubell, a student at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. (He was eating a bagel at a restaurant and Lubell walked up to him, took a bite of his bagel, and the rest is history.) It was the early 1950s, McCarthyism was in full swing, and David’s progressive politics and writing in the Law School Record, a weekly newspaper, were bringing him some unwanted attention. Additionally, while an undergraduate at Cornell University in New York, David and his twin brother, Jonathan, led discussion groups on topics such as socialism, communism, and Marxism. 

In 1953, David and Jonathan were called before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee for questioning due to their perceived connections to communism. David hadn’t been able to tell Lubell before it happened – she learned about it when she opened a newspaper and saw the headline. Although they were allowed to continue their studies, the brothers lost their scholarship funding at Harvard and were ostracized even by friends who were afraid to talk to them. “People threatened to throw acid in his face,” Lubell remembered. “It was terrible.” 

Later that year, Lubell graduated with a degree in psychology and, when she told her mother of her plans to marry David, her mother was concerned. “I remember she said, ‘Are you sure you want to marry him? It’s going to be a hard life,’” Lubell recounted. “And I said, ‘Of course. Don’t worry, Mom.’” 

Because of the attention around the questioning and his politics, David had been blacklisted. Lubell, now married and sharing his last name, couldn’t find a job as a psychologist so she worked at a Swiss watch company in Cambridge, where they lived. At night, she had a second job painting a design onto rocking chairs. But in her bits of free time, Lubell began to draw in pen and ink. In order to help bring in some more money, she turned her drawings of landscapes populated by careening birds and windswept trees, abstract designs with fields of black, and portraits of people seemingly embodied by a mystical energy into greeting cards, which she sold by the stack. The process allowed her to gradually rediscover the thread of creativity she had dropped as a young girl.

***

Becoming a mother gave Lubell the opportunity to raise her own children differently. In 1956, Lubell had her first daughter, Donna. Her second daughter, Lisa, followed a year later. The family then moved from Queens to Westchester County, New York, where her third daughter, Claudia, was born. With three kids to keep busy, Lubell began teaching art classes for her daughters and their friends.

A parent of one of the children witnessed Lubell’s aptitude for connecting with them through art. She told Lubell that Grasslands Hospital in Valhalla, New York, a psychiatric institution now called the Westchester Medical Center University Hospital, was in need of an art therapist and that she would be a good fit. Lubell insisted that she wasn’t qualified, but took the job anyway. “She knew me better than I knew myself because I just had to see these children and I knew immediately that, yes, I wanted to work there,” she said. 

She predominantly practiced art therapy with children, often using drawings of animals to access their feelings and the trauma they’d experienced, but it was an older woman named Vivian who stuck with her. No one else at the hospital had been able to connect with the woman, who was hostile and belligerent. But Lubell had done her research and she had a plan: “I said, ‘I heard you’re a poet.’” Vivian was shocked – no one else at the hospital knew this. Lubell asked to see her poetry and Vivian said she’d only share it if Lubell brought in some work of her own. “She wanted to be treated as an equal,” she said. Artist to artist. Lubell came back the next day and brought in some drawings she’d done. Vivian shared her poems. A sense of calm descended between them. 

A few years later, Lubell earned her master’s degree in art therapy from the now-closed College of New Rochelle in New York. After graduating, she taught master’s level art therapy classes at the college. All the while, her own art practice grew: in her studio, she often had two works in progress at once – an expressive painting with bold brushstrokes on an easel and an impossibly intricate pen-and-ink drawing on a table. 

Lubell said that she approached a blank canvas or piece of paper with a simple idea: the ocean, for example, or the love between women. It was the latter idea, in part, that inspired a painting she completed in 1962 called The Last Embrace. It shows one woman clinging to another, painted in somber blues and grays. Lubell didn’t use photographs or other source imagery in her work, and she didn’t take much inspiration from other artists. In fact, it was the writer and activist James Baldwin who offered her inspirational words of wisdom. 

When the attention surrounding his past faded, David became a civil rights and civil liberties lawyer. Baldwin, who Lubell calls Jimmy, was a client of David’s and a friend who came over for dinner. “I had the opportunity to sit at the table in my house with him, to talk to him, to love him, actually, as a human being,” she said. He saw The Last Embrace “and he said, ‘Doris, we should always be vulnerable.’” Afterward, she strove to be as unguarded as possible. “This is what I’ve said to every single person who I’ve ever taught art to: ‘Do not be afraid to be vulnerable.’” 

While her daughters’ friends’ mothers were often consumed with domestic duties, the mid-century societal expectation to simply be a housewife was no match for Lubell. “I painted every day,” she said. In her paintings, bands of color swoop up from women’s heads and their eyes look out somewhere visible only to them. Geometric shapes seem to communicate in a language from another plane, as in the work of Swedish artist Hilma af Klint. In her drawings, angels cluster into circles.

“The children would leave for school and I would literally drop the dish I was holding in the sink. I would do nothing except run into the studio until it was time for their lunch,” she said. Before they came home mid-day, she’d often take a shower to mark her transition back into her role as mother.

In the 1970s, Lubell joined an artists’ group with about a dozen other women that exhibited at a gallery called Pindar in Manhattan’s SoHo neighborhood. One woman in the collective was talented technically, but Lubell said that her work had no soul. “I told her, ‘You know, you’re so good. Why can’t you express what’s inside?’ And she said, ‘I don’t want my husband to know what’s inside.’ She eventually moved to Florida and played golf,” Lubell recalled.

***

Since the beginning, Lubell’s artwork has been wide-ranging in content. As she counseled the women’s group member, and as Baldwin counseled her, she has used it as a vehicle to express her emotions.

In 1978, she created a series of epic proportions: a collection of five-foot-tall pen-and-ink drawings. In the series, a man and woman gradually come closer together until they’re fused into one body. One drawing in the series, titled Polaris, is of a man and woman, their bodies composed of flora, fauna, and smaller nude figures gallivanting and communing, surrounded by a border of seemingly infinite circles. Only their toes touch. The overall effect is dazzling, but making that border “was so time consuming and boring,” Lubell said. “I couldn’t help it, it had to be there because it was perfect for the drawing. The drawing takes on its own life and pulls you to it.” 

Polaris depicted “the polarity between male and female, between religions, and everything else,” she said. “The reaction I got to that drawing astounded me. So many people related in their own way, with what they needed.” The piece was bought by a collector who donated it to the Guggenheim Museum, where it is housed in their permanent collection.  

Lubell and David moved to the Island full-time in the early 2000s, following Claudia, who had married Islander Steve Ewing. After a long illness, David died in 2012 and Lubell scattered his ashes into the ocean. At first, the grief prevented her from painting but, eventually, she was able to re-enter the studio. She painted the ocean, often in moody blues and blacks, and, on her canvasses, she began to see faces in the water. “It became more than just an ocean, it became a life unto itself,” she said.

Two years later, at age eighty-two, she exhibited her work at the A Gallery, then located in Oak Bluffs. While the deaths of her mother, husband, and other family members have all been deeply painful, Lubell said that, with time, these losses have come with the ability to further shed expectations of how she should be and what she should create. In her eighties and nineties, decades that many don’t ever get to see, she has continued to come into herself as an artist.

That evolution is evident in her visual diaries, which she has kept for more than thirty years. Each is filled with experimental paintings and drawings in an array of styles so varied – intricate pen and ink; soft charcoal; vibrant color here and austere whites and grays there – it seems as if a dozen artists contributed. All the while, the voice that told Lubell to keep going sometimes came from a place deep within her and was sometimes externalized and personified. A painting Lubell made of a girl’s face, shrouded in a misty blue expanse, has been on display in her studio for years. “She’s some spiritual entity in my mind that’s keeping my soul alive,” she said. The young girl encourages her onward. 

She isn’t religious but Lubell believes in a kind of paradise of art-making. “Sometimes when I left the studio, I would just say goodbye and, when I was happy, I would look back and say thank you,” she said. “The appreciation I felt was a joy. That joy very often didn’t last in the morning, because the painting didn’t look as good.” The work was never over.

Then, last August, Lubell developed Guillain-Barré syndrome, an autoimmune condition that has curled and tightened her fingers, rendering them nearly useless – nearly. Now, every day, Lubell sits at her computer and types with the finger she can extend, one key at a time. She’s writing a short story about two people that run away into the woods (with their chicken named H.B. for Hard Boiled and its offspring, S.B.). Getting to the computer requires a cane and assistance from a caretaker but, once she’s in place, the world opens up again. “I feel free,” she said. 

Sitting on an orange couch in her studio, I asked Lubell if there was anything that she hadn’t done yet that she still wanted to do. “There’s a difference between wanting to and being able to,” she said. But, if she was able, she would like to make one last painting.

“Occasionally I think of it,” she said. “On the left-hand side of the canvas is a face looking up to an empty space, looking into the future. Or a big splash of color. Or the ocean. Or, for a while I tried to paint what I didn’t know, because I thought maybe I’d find out about the universe. But I never found out.” Or so she says.