“It was very emotional because I was thinking of the women who were close to me that I’ve lost,” said Deb Peery, creator of the painting, which is titled “Beneath the Surface.”

In addition to having lost friends and loved ones to breast cancer, Peery’s family has a long history of cancer related deaths.

“Everybody in my family has died from cancer, different forms. So we are hypervigilant,” Peery said.

This hypervigilance led Peery to regularly receive breast examinations and these medical experiences were the initial inspiration for her painting.

“Beneath the Surface,” a painting created by local artist Deb Peery, is dedicated to breast cancer survivors and is inspired by Peery’s own anxieties and grief surrounding breast cancer.

“When you go for a mammogram, you have stages. You’ve got the mammogram, then you have the ultrasound, then you have the biopsy. So I was thinking back to my 30s when I had my first biopsy,” Peery said.

Most women are in their 40s when they begin receiving regular mammograms. For Peery, she had already undergone not only a mammogram but a breast biopsy.

“I had to go for a biopsy, a needle biopsy, and while I was working on this painting, I remember at that young age the flood of thoughts that went through my head,” Peery said. “I’m confident that I’m not the only woman or individual who has had to confront those fears.”

Peery tapped into those fears from that anxious time in her life and channeled them into her artistic process though collaging initially.

“I went through women’s magazines and I pulled out everything that spoke to me in regards to this and then I started pulling things apart,” Peery said. “Then I thought, you know, I need to take it to the next step.”

Deb Peery’s “Beneath the Surface” painting in the early stages as it begins to take shape. The woman’s hair is composed of a ripped apart collage of breast cancer themed imagery. Photo from Deb Peery.

Peery grabbed the medical documentations of her own mammograms and biopsies and began clipping images on top of those and working them into her collage.

“Then I thought, OK, this is getting really emotional really quick,” Peery said.

Peery began shaping the collage around an illustration of a woman’s face to represent the anxious thoughts about breast cancer surrounding the woman.

“Here’s the mammograms, the ultrasounds, all the anxieties, everything that we go through,” Peery said.

Peery has had several biopsies and breast lumps removed since that initial breast biopsy.

In Peery’s family, cancer is talked about with the casualness of a family discussing football. Peery reflected on this and wanted to uplift the imagery to overcome some of the fear and anxiety she had originally channeled into the piece.

This reflection inspired Peery to paint flowers atop the collage of anxieties to represent hope overcoming fear.

“And so that’s where she starts to come through, and you can see the garden starting to bloom around her,” Peery said.

When looked at closely, the edges of the original anxiety collage papers are still visible under the rich colors of the flowers.

“I had planned on more paper showing through, but the more I painted and the more I thought of the love of all my friends who have dealt with it or have died from it, close girlfriends, close colleagues, I just started painting more and more flowers because of the love and the passion I had for these women,” Peery said.

For Peery the act of painting these flowers over the breast cancer anxieties was a way to celebrate the women who had survived and died from breast cancer, like hope blossoming out of devastation.

“It’s dedicated to the women who continue to celebrate joy and those who are still in their struggle and those who feel like they’ve championed it,” Peery said.

The face and eyes of the painting are ambiguous and unreadable so people may transfer their own emotions onto the woman and start a dialogue about what she must be feeling. Is she weeping? Is she troubled? Is she accepting?

Peery also left the bottom chest area of the woman purposely unfinished to symbolize the unique journeys of each breast cancer survivor.

Peery described friends who had mastectomies and decided to not have nipples reconstructed after surgery because they felt there was no point. Another friend decided to have no breasts reconstructed at all.

“She had said, ‘Take them. Take the breasts. Don’t care if they don’t define me. Don’t need it. I have my identity without these things. Is this all that humanity sees? Is this the only thing that society sees?'” Peery said of her friend’s thought process.

This is the reason the woman’s chest is unfinished in the painting. Whatever the woman in the painting decides to do with her chest is part of her yet unfinished story of breast cancer survival.

“It was a piece of love and passion and my own fear and the beginning of it was my own panic,” Peery said. After Peery was able to process the initial waves of fear and anxiety she instead used this creative process to celebrate survivors and lost loved ones and the beauty they’ve shown the world.

The painting will be at the Double D-Haw breast cancer fundraising event at the Blue Rider on Saturday, Sept. 21, at 5 p.m.