Porcelain painter continues to create despite failing eyesight

CLINTON, Ill. – On a piece of porcelain in her left hand was a flower outlined with dark black lines. In her right hand was a brush, and underneath it a palette of paints marching clockwise in a circle.\n“See, I’m loading my brush now,” said Margie Sweazy of Clinton, dipping it where she’d been told the paint was located. Then she held up the brush with a colored tip.\n As she looked out through the magnifying lenses she wore, Sweazy could explain what she was doing. But even with the magnification, and even with the dark outlined image, she couldn’t see what had almost become second nature after 40 years.\n“I can’t see the outline,” she said. “I’m lost. I know I need to bring this together, but \nI’m lost.”\nCalmly tapping the porcelain, her friend and former teacher Junette Seiler told Sweazy, “Come up here where my finger is. Now down toward your right hand. There. \nThat’s good.”\n“OK,” Sweazy said jokingly. “Did I pass?”\nSweazy, a porcelain painter and creator, began losing her sight about a dozen years ago. Glaucoma, surgeries, a hemorrhage in one eye and a deteriorating optic nerve have contributed to her sight loss.\n“In the last six months, I’ve lost even more,” Sweazy said.\nBut then, smiling, she added, “I see light and dark. I’m thankful for that. I try to make the best of it.”\nSeiler is among a group of artist friends who have been spending “Mondays with Margie” for about 25 years. Though they used to meet in Bloomington, Ill., for years they’ve gathered in Sweazy’s studio, which was damaged severely four years ago during a tornado in Clinton. It’s here that Sweazy painted and where she also fired ceramics and poured and \nfired porcelain.\nAs Sweazy’s eyesight left her, her friends did not. They figured out a way to keep her going right along with them until just recently. Seiler used a black marker, which disappeared in firing and helped to guide Sweazy’s work.\n“She’d paint,” Seiler said. “I’d straighten up the lines, using the blues and purples where she wanted them. I tried to do her style as much as \nI could.”\nIt was in the late 1960s or early 1970s that Sweazy took her first porcelain painting lessons. She recalled seeing her first teacher, Ann Ryholt, at a Clinton Apple & Pork Festival, who told her, “When I’d look at china painting, I’d \nhear music.”\nNot long after that, she and Wilma Leach of Decatur began taking lessons together.\nSweazy moved to Clinton as a young bride after graduating from high school in California, though she’d met her husband of 61 years, George Sweazy, during an earlier visit \nto Clinton.\n“I graduated in June. He returned from World War II, and we were married in December. He was afraid he would lose me,” she added, grinning.\nDuring the war, Margie Sweazy said she performed both tap- and toe-dance (ballet), entertaining with the USO aboard ships and in\ntroop camps.\n“We had three different shows. Our teacher came from New York, and we had production numbers. I danced on my toes many times with blisters on them,” \nSweazy said.\nNow, with the help of a housekeeper and meal delivery, Sweazy cares for her husband, who has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease.\nAnd Mondays with Margie will continue. \n“We want her to know we’re still here,” Seiler said. “I’m not brave. I’m just trying to survive, and I want to be happy.”