A grieving mum has turned her love of art into a sprawling passion project that is helping to beautify Cayman Brac.
-Photo: Submitted
Wendy Valera rediscovered her love of painting as a form of therapy following the death of her daughter, Ashlee, who was 16 when she died from cancer in 2020.
The mum and daughter used to paint together and former Layman E. Scott High School student Ashlee had planned to study art professionally and dreamed of going to Japan.
Her mother, Wendy, originally from Honduras, said she had picked up her paintbrushes again as a way to cope with losing her eldest child.
When I start painting I just don’t want to stop, I just concentrate…. I just like being by myself and going with it,” she said.
Now she is turning her private passion into a public project, painting murals of butterflies, sea life and other animals around Cayman Brac.
She was working on a road crew with the Public Works Department, beautifying the island, when the idea occurred to her.
She persuaded her bosses that they could do more than retouch the plain paint work on the walls around the daycare centre on the Bluff, the Spot Bay and West End parks.
With the help of her crew, they got to work.
“We just started with the car tyres, and then I said, ‘We can make flowerpots and we can make animals out of it’, and that’s how we started,” she said.
“I knew already that I can paint, but that’s when they realised that I can do it,” she said.
After that, she said, the community came on board with donations of paint and brushes, helping them finish the job.
Over time, the West End children’s park on the Brac was transformed into a colourful play space, with tyres and plant pots fashioned into animals and cartoon characters.
One of her favourite pieces is a memorial wall for her daughter, filled with butterflies, the creature she loved to paint most.
Valera said producing the the artwork and seeing the positive response from the community and from her own children has helped her deal with her grief and feel the support of the people around her.
She said her daughter had shared her talent and particularly loved Japanese anime-style art.
“I know she’s proud because she always used to help me because she was pursuing the career [in art],” Valera said.
“Since I was a little girl, I loved art but I never had the opportunity to go to art school or nothing like that,” she said.
She said she and her daughter would often paint together.
“She used to laugh at me because with one brush I do everything. She used to laugh and teach me how to use the brushes. It was like with make-up. I don’t know about all those brushes,” she said.
She said she always valued her daughter’s opinion and would ask her how her drawings looked.
Valera has been working on a new mural on the wall at Spot Bay Cove, but she said she had to stop because she is now bartending, and finances to complete it have run out.
She said she is hoping she gets donations and support so she can complete the mural that has livened up the drab walls at the boat launch ramp and surrounding area.<
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