Gary's story

A Second Language
Gary Bachers came to art the way many remarkable things begin: not by design, but by necessity. Always creatively gifted, he contributed meticulous drawings to his high school yearbook and wrote witty comic strips to entertain his friends. He was also something of a musical prodigy, beginning piano at age six and ultimately earning a degree in piano performance from the Royal Conservatory of Music. At the University of Manitoba, his talents extended far beyond the keyboard: he graduated as the top undergraduate in his faculty, was valedictorian
and won the university gold medal in chemistry, and went on to earn a master’s degree in organic chemistry, seriously considering a career in research. His prized possession during those years was a baby grand piano he purchased with part of his scholarship money. When the time came to choose a path, he weighed his love of music against his passion for science, and ultimately chose medicine over both the concert hall and the laboratory, a practical decision made with a growing family in mind. But he never stopped playing, filling his home evenings with the sweeping Rachmaninov and Tchaikovsky concertos he loved, performed alongside his Music Minus One recordings.

A Life Interrupted

In 1987, at age 38 and only a decade into his medical career, Gary suffered a massive stroke. He had recently built a new home with his wife Gabrielle for their growing family, and their three children were still young: the eldest was 13, the middle child 10, and the youngest just 8 years old. The result of an arteriovenous malformation, the stroke damaged his left frontal lobe and left him with Broca’s aphasia, the inability to produce spoken or written language, and right-sided hemiplegia, the complete paralysis of his right arm, hand, and leg. He spent weeks in the hospital, much of it in an induced coma. When he came home in time for Christmas, his family was overjoyed, and then quietly, achingly, began the work of getting to know a changed man.

He could manage only two or three halting words at a time. He couldn’t walk. His right arm hung limp at his side. For a physician who had built his life on intelligence, precision, and communication, the losses were devastating. Despite exhausting months of physical, speech, and occupational therapy, he was unable to recover the use of his right hand or regain his speech, stumbling even over a therapist’s simplest flash cards. His early determination gave way to despair, and he began refusing the assigned therapies. He had reached his limits, and he knew it.

Finding a New Voice

He returned first to his piano, afraid his musical ability was gone, and overjoyed to discover it wasn’t. He could still read music, and he could still play with his left hand alone. At his desk, he soon abandoned the effort to relearn writing and instead began sketching flowers from his wife Gabrielle’s garden. What made this especially remarkable is that Gary was right-handed. The stroke had not only paralyzed his dominant hand, it had forced him to rebuild his most basic skills from scratch using his non-dominant left hand. The delicate, controlled mark-making that his art would eventually demand was learned, painstakingly, by a hand that had never been trained for it.

With Gabrielle’s encouragement, he discovered colored pencils and Mylar film, a smoother surface that gave his retraining left hand greater control and precision. Slowly, a new practice took shape. As his body of work grew, Gabrielle began submitting his pieces to juried exhibitions, and within a few years the work was winning awards and earning entry to regional and national shows. In 2008, after Gabrielle had learned to frame his works professionally, the two began traveling together to art shows and festivals across the country, where Gary found devoted collectors moved not only by the beauty of his art, but by the extraordinary story behind it.

A Legacy in Color

Gary Bachers is no longer with us, but the works he created remain a testament to what the human spirit is capable of when stripped of everything it once relied upon. Created entirely with his non-dominant hand, in a medium he discovered only after illness had closed every other door, his colored pencil compositions on Mylar stand as some of the most quietly astonishing works you are likely to encounter. They were made by a man who had lost his words, and who found, in their place, something that needed none.
As part of his stroke-recovery therapy, Bachers had to first learn to hold a pencil in his left hand. After his frustrating realization that he could not, however, form words with the pencil, Bachers eventually started sketching flowers from his wife’s garden. With colored pencils he began perfecting his compositions of lilies, peonies, irises, and birds of paradise. Bachers seemed to develop his own language of design as his art evolved from simple monotone sketches to meticulous and brilliantly colorful composition. Mandalas, human figures, insects, and architecture feature in many of the works, but the full moon is the most pervasive element in the Bachers artistic lexicon, as if to mark not only the brief moment of spectacular beauty but also each composition’s place in the cosmos.