Lila was born in Alabama and still lives in the small central Alabama town of her birth. Making things was part of her life for as long as she can remember. Her story is amazing.

Lila’s childhood was darkened by a traumatic, violent experience after which creating became an escape from her bad memories. In therapy, “the happy child lived in my drawings” so creating art became a healing activity. Then when Lila was twenty-six, she was diagnosed with terminal cancer- 3rd stage melanoma. After surgery, she was given a brief sentence: “two to four months left.”

Lila decided to embark on a spiritual and physical journey alone… A wandering to San Miguel, Mexico that resulted in visitors seeing a young woman painting on the streets, while wearing a set of angel’s wings worn like a backpack. Lila’s logic was that if she was supposed to die and become an angel in Heaven, then perhaps Lila-as-angel could live here on earth for a while longer. She treated each work of art as if it were her last.  In San Miguel, Lila woke up. The next day she woke up again and then kept on waking up, not dying, for days after arriving there. Eventually it turned into weeks. In a supreme moment of self-awareness, Lila knew that she had painted herself well.

Mud season arrived, the tourists were gone and she returned home to friends, family and doctors in disbelief of her healthy condition. Within a short time she fell in love with a musician, Jonathan. They married and in July of 2000 became parents of a cherub, Lucy. In the Spring of 2002 another daughter, Bea, was born. Lila enjoyed motherhood and rearing her two daughters after a divorce.  “I know I live in complete grace and constant bliss now.”

Lila says, “My whimsical style is an untrained voice, because of my self-healing. I had to go back to that child to discover who I was. That’s how this artwork was born. I know which voice I need to talk in to take care of myself, and sometimes my child voice is the one that heals the unhealthy imprinting of my past.”

“I think people need to know that it’s possible not to be a victim of unhappy memories. Now I speak from a healed child’s voice. God has blessed me with my story, and I think it’s my obligation not to abandon either that healed child or my cancer survival story.”

Marcia Weber, adapted from an article by William Andrews

Lila Graves Available Works

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