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Ellensburg, Washington
Jane Orleman admits her paintings are "downright obscene." A recent gallery exhibit in her home town opened with the warning ADULT EXHIBIT. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN. Inside the Community Art Gallery, the artist's neighbors could view "Telling Secrets"--several dozen autobiographical paintings depicting beatings, alcoholic rage, gang rape, incest, and parental indifference.
"While these paintings are intensely personal, I feel they will speak to others who have similar painful memories," says Orleman. And, she says, "people need to know that 25 per cent of the women they know have had experience with sexual abuse."
Many boys also experience abuse during childhood, or witness assaults, Orleman says. Several male visitors cried when they saw the show, she recalls. "They have their own secrets," she says, "the things they can't tell the truth about."
Two years ago, the forty-nine-year-old artist started to produce paintings illustrating a child's perspective and found herself painting the long-suppressed story of her own brutalization. These child-view images, the artist says, allowed her "to say in painting what I...