{lives remembered}


Donald Woodruff D


n


1946-2010


After a debilitating accident, he became an artist — and an inspiration


by GeorGe Gonzalez | photos by sean MccorMick


onald A. Woodruff spent his last six years painting a fence. That undertaking would appear unremarkable, but Woodruff was quadriplegic and had no feeling below his collarbone. The only movements his body could make were limited up-and- down, left-to-right motions with his right arm. The fence work was painstaking; he worked with a brush extension fashioned


out of old gardening tools and metal clasps, and painted from a motorized wheelchair. Still, Woodruff was intent on making the fence a piece of art.


In 1964, after a night of drinking


with high school friends, Woodruff got behind the wheel and collided head- on with another drunk driver in North Beach, Md. Woodruff was left para- lyzed from the neck down. As part of his rehab, a nurse brought him a paint-by- number kit, with which he learned to weave a thin brush through the frozen fingers in his right hand. Over time, Woodruff worked with


oils and watercolors and rendered por- traits of sea captains and cowboys. Perhaps his most striking portrait was that of his girlfriend Lauren Wilson’s father in profile: the face hardened and dusk-orange, a cigarette angled out the mouth, and short white hair capped under a newsboy hat—project- ing an illusion of flat relief against a solid black backdrop. No less impres- sive were Woodruff ’s series of birds cast in traditional Japanese watercol- ors or his depiction of a legless hand biker speeding down a race lane. He also painted from photographs taken by Joy, his daughter from an earlier re-


Several of the completed scenes on the fence outside Donald Woodruff and Lauren Wilson’s home.


lationship, who was born 10 years after his accident. Woodruff, who was an insurance ad-


juster with Cigna from 1974 to 1984, sold his work at local art shows and accepted commissioned portraits of families and dogs. Displaying his work, however, was not easy. His van was out- fitted with a series of levers allowing him to drive and haul, but lifting the artwork and setting up his art table re- quired greater effort. Wilson, whom he had known for more than 20 years, be- came his extra set of hands.


Woodruff and Wilson met at Inwood


House, an apartment community in Silver Spring for people with disabili- ties — she is 3-foot-9 and has endured worsening arthritis. When they de- cided to move into a house in 2003, they needed to build rooms with wide doorways for his wheelchair and low countertops for her. Their house, once constructed, sat


closer to the fence than planned, and the southern view from each window was of the pale brown boards. Or as Woodruff saw it, a canvas. “Don decided to paint


2001 PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY OF JOY WOODRUFF


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