Martha Hollingsworth
on...Treating Life Like a Canvas

Every morning, a small van loaded with youngsters headed to daycare stops at a house on Western Avenue. The children wave and say hello to a mother and her young son who peer out a window and wave back at the van. What a friendly neighborhood! Well, yes . . . and no . . . The woman and her son are a trompe l'oeil painting by the artist resident of the house, Martha Hollingsworth.

Trompe l'oeil (pronounced trump-LOY) is a French phrase meaning 'to trick or fool the eye.' "It's a lot of fun," Hollingsworth admits. "It's like adapting set design or theater decor to a household."

Hollingsworth decorates her home with theatrical flair. A recent project has been to paint ivy leaves on the walls of her screened porch. "I'm thinking of adding a hole in the wall," she says.

She's also planning to cover her basement floor with painted clover, the walls with flowers and the ceiling with clouds. "It'll be like a fantasy," she says.

Hollingsworth's entire house is a work in progress. She is stripping woodwork and wallpaper in her kitchen. Many homeowners have tackled this project, but what makes Hollingsworth's home different is that her final look will come not out of House Beautiful but out of her rich imagination.

She describes her decor as "eclectic, to say the least." French antiques sit side-by-side with furniture found on curbs and refurbished, yard sale bargains splashed with a rainbow of colors, original artwork, family heirlooms, and objects found in markets throughout the world. "Everything I have has a story," she says. "I wouldn't have anything that I would just go out and buy."

One of her favorite possessions she calls "my white trash Christmas tree. I found a '60's aluminum tree. We've been collecting McDonald's Happy Meals toys for years. We tie the toys on it. I just love it. Now I'm looking for a whirling spotlight for it."

Hollingsworth, the daughter of a Navy chaplain, has lived in Panama, Turkey, and France. She once traveled around the world in six weeks, and she lived in France for 14 years. Although she comes from an artistic background, Hollingsworth's formal art training began in Bordeaux, France.

"My mother's an art teacher. My father's mother was a painter. My mother's mother was a milliner and seamstress," she says. "It's a way of life."

Hollingsworth studied sculpture in Bordeaux. "I also worked for a sculpture for a year, sculpting wood carvings for furniture," she says. "We hand cut shells, roses, chair legs. That was a lot of fun."

Later she received her bachelor's degree from Columbia College and her master's degree from the University of Illinois at Chicago, specializing in biomedical visualization.

Hollingsworth, a French teacher at the College of DuPage, returns to France as often as she can. At one point she lived in Paris with her two oldest sons, Charles and Geoffroy, where she worked as a graphic designer.

"Two years ago I spent three months in France and did copy work at the Louvre," she says. "Now I'm working on organizing a trip with some of my students. We plan to rent a house in the country so they can be immersed."

Hollingsworth is finishing up two pieces she started at the Louvre. Entitled "Sacramental Places of Blended Worlds," the paintings combine Hollingsworth's ethnic backgrounds. "On my mother's side, I am partly Native American," she explains. "It's something that she (mother) is just now talking about freely. It's been a sensitive subject."

She plans to exhibit the canvases at Chicago's Newberry Library in an art display by Native Americans called Meeting Ground. The paintings will also hang at the University of Illinois during October, Native American Awareness Month. She has had her work displayed in Paris and Bordeaux, and at Woman Made and Vignette Galleries in Chicago.

Hollingsworth's favorite genre is painting people. "I try to capture who the person is rather than something superficial, like making them look nice," she says. "If you want that kind of picture, you can go to Glamour Shots."

Hollingsworth's sons have inherited her creative bent and linguistic talents. Geoffroy, 23, is an artist in Oregon, while Charles, 26, is a poet. Her youngest son, Tom Hanlon, 13, is not only a visual artist but also an accomplished cellist. "I used to be involved in the Arts in the Schools program in District 41," she says. "Now I'm involved in being a Suzuki mom and in teaching him French. When I took him to France, he went out to the corner shop and came back with chocolate croissants and the right change. I'd like to put him in a French school for two months to perfect his French."

Her next trip will not be to France, however. It will be to her birthplace, Birmingham, Alabama, for the premiere of Spike Lee's movie, "Four Little Girls". The plot concerns the bombing of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church in which four little girls died. Hollingsworth attended this church when she moved back from France, and it was here that she met the godparents of one of her sons. "People said I shouldn't go to church there because it was a black church and I would be in danger," she remembers. "It was just the opposite."

Whether in France, Birmingham, or Glen Ellyn, Hollingsworth faces life like an empty canvas, ready to fill it with color.

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