Having known only that Ann Doll was homeless, a veteran of several drug addictions, and as a fine artist, one of Las Vegas' hidden treasures, I met her in one of our town's most dissolute neighborhoods, and from the moment she limped near enough to smell her smoker's breath, I understood Ann for who she in reality is: an excitable woman who strives to squeeze all that she has into every stroke of life, as if it were going to be her last.
She doesn't know any different. Her sentences contain sparse periods and verbs in every tense, her feet shuffle without pause, and her hands—slender and theatrical—wave in accord with her thespian voice, firing off tale after tale. And oh! what a storyteller she is, flamboyant and imperturbable, and tamed only by her own capacity to endure the bodily pain that has tormented her life for the past dozen years.
Ann's poor now, with nothing more to her name than the $3 in her pocket this afternoon, her invaluable paintings stored away in a friend's room, and a libretto of memories which seem to stem from another life.
"Oh man, I remember my mom dressing up real beautiful for the Emmys, I remember specific waves I surfed in Hawaii while I lived there, and I remember Italy and France and New York, and of course the accident that broke my world, and I remember winning the best in show at the Las Vegas Art Museum," she said, her translucent brown eyes darting in perpetual motion. "But nothing's fluid; it's all snapshots with me, in my mind."
And then, with her hand to her forehead, a tattoo slithering from out of her long sleeves, she said:
"Dude, I have so much to tell it's unreal."
She came to Las Vegas 12 years ago, seeking in the arid climate relief from the chronic arthritis aching her body, but in the end all that Ann found was a wasteland for the fine arts. Which was unsavory to her soul, because art had been, since the age of 3, her one true vocation, and those innate urges to paint were still pulsating through her veins, neither requesting nor pleading but demanding to be exorcised. And so, in line with her own constitution but contrary to her environment, she continued to do what she does best: paint. Naked women, insufferable passions, doomed lovers, unconfessable sins, moments of pure saintliness captured in time—Ann would produce throughout her calamitous years in Southern Nevada one explosive painting after another, each stemming from both meticulous mappings and unobstructed intuition, and each constituting about one month's work, with 40 hours of actual brush time.
"I've always just felt like a medium," she says. "It's like God is feeling with my heart, seeing with my eyes, painting with my hand."
Each piece is about waist-high and the length of a petite woman's wingspan, and she lugged them all around town with unconquerable resolve during her first years in Las Vegas. Yet, despite her pedestrian efforts, she failed to find either venues or buyers. In this respect, she says, Las Vegas was a stark contrast from metropolises in which she used to live and paint, such as New York and Los Angeles, where the splendid fruits of her talent were not only well-received but solicited as well. Even after she won the acclaimed Best in Show prize in the 2004 contest at the Las Vegas Art Museum, her work remained immobile.
She persisted, nevertheless, finding daily courage from the phantasmagoric resonance of her dead father's voice.
His name was Allan Balter, and he had been a writer and producer apprized for his contributions to television shows like Mission: Impossible, The Outer Limits and San Francisco International Airport. But prior to winning Emmys for his masterful work, he had met, while on a movie location in Germany, Ann's mother, a timeless beauty whose hidden demons—manic depression, suicidal tendencies—no one could understand, let alone help. They flew back to Allan's home in Southern California in 1958 to give birth to an American daughter, Ann Balter, and then returned overseas, where their little girl would spend her initial years in the continental winds that inspired the artists she would come to adore: the Michelangelos and Van Goghs and Salvador Dalis.
After they returned to Southern California, Allan would fill their bohemian home with the sound of exploding bombs as he gave Cinnamon Carter and Rollin Hand their enduring lines on his archaic typewriter, or with the clamor of Hollywood parties, during which he would point out to movie stars the precocious artwork of his daughter and introduce his little Ann by a weighty name: "The Artist." Ann now understands those privileged times as the point she was not only set on her path to becoming a professional painter but also given the confidence to pursue it at all costs.
Her family moved to Hawaii, where she expended her athletic energies in the ocean, surfing waves so large and uproarious that they would remain indelible in her memory more than 30 years later. And then she went off to school, in Italy, where without deliberation she enrolled in the fine studies of all things art.
"When I went to study abroad—which-I-dug!—I was an honor roll student, real sober and responsible, and that's when some Italians gave me the name 'Ann Doll', because I had a real doll face" she says. "I fell in love with the whole experience."
In fact, she traveled the entire continent, floating between idyllic sceneries like an untamed eagle, and her only burden back then was those implacable urges that torment an artist until they are exorcised, anywhere and by any means. And in this way she learned to express herself on the world's many canvases, like napkins and notebooks and even her very own flesh, and using any tool available, like crayons and watercolors and even tattoo ink.
It was a providential lesson in improvising, because in less than 15 years she would be suffering in Las Vegas without enough money for even pencil and paper.
It all started to fall apart with the death of her father in 1981. A heart attack. Her mother, who had been divorced from Allan for several years, committed suicide soon thereafter. And then, it all came crashing down when she and a man with whom she was fighting on the fourth floor of a Los Angeles building fell all the way down.
She came down hard; and so did he, right on top of her. "It was like the accident broke every bone in my body, except my spine," she says, her eyes fastened to the ground. "My feet were crushed, and I was in a wheelchair for a long time."
And further: "I've been in so much pain since then, man, and it just won't go away."
It's been, she says, pain that neither the medicines of doctors nor the opiates of illicit distributors have been able to abate. Pain that has rendered her helpless, unable to work and dependent upon the charity of friends and the skim provisions of her monthly Supplemental Security Income check to survive. And pain that has accompanied her in bed each night, like an unwelcomed but relentless intruder, whispering in her ear: Why go on another day? Why get up in the morning just to put weight back on those unbearable feet? Why spend another day fidgeting with me? Why spend another sleepless night in sweat and anguish?
Ann says she has found her nightly answer in her creations: her daughter, and her grandson, who live in Texas, unaware of Ann's destitution; and, of course, her art.
She's brought her paintings with her to "like, 4 million or something homes I've been through in Vegas," and kept it in storage when she didn't have one, such as now. Her collection rests idle and largely unobserved next to historical photos and Chinese lithographs in the artsy room of her friend Kurt Turner, a man whom she met when she moved to Las Vegas and who has since then helped her in her perpetual fight against addictions.
"Now I'm at the point where it's no longer what I paint, but how I paint," she says. "And I will break every rule I know to do something new and unique."
In other words, she told me on the day we met not too long ago, she is only satisfied now, after nearly a half century of painting, half of which has come under tribulation, with creating not just innovative pieces, but entirely new artistic concepts as well.
Her body began to pang her in the early evening chill, and so she said she had to go find rest, but not before departing with a conclusive line: "I've never been a commercial artist, but I would like to sell some work, pay for rent and bills and food, and some new art supplies, and then maybe send what's left to my daughter and grandson, so they'll keep me in their thoughts."