Paintings

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Mews Small, Painter

“Faces of Mews”

Mud paintings were Mews’s first art works. Starting about age 3 or 4, she discovered the best way to get her mother to pay attention to her was to paint, as her mother was an artist. This continued through grammar school.

Her high school years were really crappy, and she did not paint. Instead, she wrote morose poems, played baseball and became a ski racer trying to kill herself!

Fortunately these attempts failed, her father grounded her, at which point she pretended to be happy and stopped getting into trouble and breaking bones.

These feelings are reflected in some of her later paintings. She finally decided to escape from home in her teens and bought a one-way train ticket to New York City. There, she met Dustin Hoffman, who cast her in a play he was directing, Gretrude Steins’s “Brucie and Willy”. She then took up acting and studied with Dusty. Shortly after that, he became famous and she did ten years of resident theatre, and then finally landed a Broadway show. She originated and created the role of “Frenchy” in the show “Grease”.

After a year, on Broadway she came out to Hollywood for her first movie role in Woody Allen’s “Sleeper”. She went on to do 17 movies including the Academy Award winning film, “One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest” playing “Candy”, Jack Nicholson‘s girlfriend.

Mews began her painting career in New York in a distraught state. Fed up with various therapies, she began to paint and feel much better. Paint was cheaper and a lot more fun. She had several shows in New York and sold paintings, a few to well-known people, and we won‘t tell you who they are!

After moving to Hollywood, she stopped painting for a few years, and just did movies. Her parents became ill. While caring for them she decided it would be a good idea to ask her mother, who was a great painter, to teach her all that she could. This proved to be a very good idea and wonderful experience for both. Painting is good for the soul and in the process of that expression great healing and fulfillment is found.