ARLENE SALMON

LIKE many talented artists, Arlene Salmon has been creative since childhood, when, according to her mother’s accounts, she would only ask for crayons at Christmas. Crayons, it seems, were the gateway into a deep passion for art that led to summer art camps at the Worcester Museum of Art, and Salmon eventually went on to Moore College of Art and majored in interior design, graduating with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree. During her evenings, Salmon took oil painting classes. She started a family, and when her son was 18 months old, his curiosity became the undoing of his mother’s pursuit of painting. “He was standing beside me at the easel and grabbed a paintbrush full of paint and proceeded to put it in his mouth,” she says. “I packed my paints away and didn’t paint again until years later.”

Despite her long absence from painting, Salmon’s talents never left her. Nor did her desire to create. Still, she did not pick up a brush again until 2016, when her youngest was diagnosed with stage 4 Hodgkin lymphoma. “It was recommended that I, as a caretaker, needed to find something I loved,” she recalls. “I started taking painting classes at the Art League in Alexandria, Virginia, and somehow ended