The Australian artist and journalist has written her first book at 80 – and the result is a confident and lean autobiography, recalling a mother who was ‘determined to be unhappy’
hen Australian-born artist Judy Cotton was struck down by Lyme disease in the 1990s – having been bitten by a tick at her country home in Lyme, Connecticut – she had to find a way to create art through the crippling pain. Turning away from large gestural paintings, she grouped small panels into expansive bursts of colour for a series titled Swimmers.
Growing up in Broken Hill, Eve had her own obstacles – a drunk father and a “beautiful, easy” sister who overshadowed her. She gave up the piano to marry a handsome, charismatic local boy, Robert Cotton, who would become a Liberal senator and a diplomat. As a mother to two daughters and a son, Eve judged her girls as she had been judged, on looks, clothes and marriages – “and we both lost in the equation”.
She was wounded – “a crater that never healed” – by the death of her cousin Tony, while flying a helicopter in Vietnam. As she writes after a boy drowns, “Joy comes with teeth.”
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