Body of work: Artist draws inspiration through pain

Allison Massari has something she needs to tell you.

About what she learned from the excruciating pain of being burned across half her body in a car accident.

About how she endured torturous treatments and surgeries and physical therapy to come out the other side, only to suffer a brain injury in a second debilitating crash.

About what it's like to be scorned for your disfigurement and have your melted flesh poked and prodded by strangers as if you were a sideshow attraction.

About what it's like when a wounded brain malfunctions so badly that you, a professional artist, fail to recognize the color blue.

The message Massari, who grew up in St. Petersburg, wants you to get: Life is beautiful. And if it can be beautiful for someone who has gone through so much trauma, it can be for you as well. There are steps you can take, things you can do.

"My life has been filled with so many incredible stories, and meaningful and poetic things that have happened, and so many intense things," she says from her home in the San Francisco area. "It's such a miraculous story.

There is a path to happiness through tragedy.

And now, finally, she says she's ready to tell everyone who wants to listen.

* * *

Massari, 43, grew up in northeast St. Petersburg and graduated from St. Petersburg Catholic High School in 1983. She has spent 20 years building a career as an artist. In June, the Museum of Fine Arts in St. Petersburg added one of her paper collages to its permanent collection.

"Collage can sometimes look flat, but Allison creates this beautiful modeling to create a dimensionality with subtle tones of shadows and light and different hues of color," chief curator Jennifer Hardin says. "To see it in person is even more stunning."

In 1998, Massari's work was part of a group exhibition at the Tampa Museum of Art. One night in April during the time she was preparing for the June exhibit, Massari's vintage Jeep Cherokee was struck head-on at 60 mph as she drove through Pinellas Park to visit her parents.

Massari remembers the crash in slow motion, as if someone was showing it to her frame by frame.

Driver's side door wouldn't budge. Click.

First flicker of flame near the passenger seat head rest. Click

Fire racing through the vehicle's interior. Her body becoming engulfed. Her lungs filling with acrid smoke.

Click. Click. Click.

The pain exceeded words. How does someone describe a car seat melting to the skin? There is no comprehension.

What she can describe is the agony of loneliness she felt at that moment.

"The loneliness that I was going to die alone was as bad as the pain," she says.

And then there was beauty: A bystander's face unexpectedly appeared next to her window. The glass shattered from his kick. Being pulled from the fire. Flames on her body extinguished by his bare hands.

"It was so beautiful," she says. "Here I am going, 'Please don't let me die alone,' and the next moment I saw this face next to the glass. I'll never forget that first gasp for air. I just sucked in as much as I could get."

The police, expecting her to die, sent her crash report to the homicide division. After months of skin grafts and infection that nearly killed her, she returned home to be cared for by her father, Frank, a doctor, and her mother, Anne, a former nurse.

Along the way, there were crushing moments. Like when an emergency room nurse admonished her for inadvertently frightening patients with her open burn wounds. Or when a date who caught a glimpse of the skin on her back compared her to Freddy Krueger and disappeared.

It would take years for her to feel anything approximating normalcy.

That's one thing she wants to share: There is compassion in forgiveness. The nurse who shunned her? The women at the gym who prodded her bare back? Their reactions were understandable. Had she been prepared, she could have managed their reactions in a way that restored humanity to the situation.

She wants you to know that. She wants to tell you how you can do that, too.

* * *

And then, inexplicably, came more trauma.

In 2001, after moving to Colorado, a vehicle rear-ended her Toyota 4Runner the day after Halloween on a highway outside of Denver.

The crash's impact inflicted severe head trauma, causing her to experience double vision. Dismissed from the hospital with a concussion diagnosis, she soon found she couldn't read. She watched movies with sunglasses because of light sensitivity. She would try to use paint brushes but would be unable to identify colors.

Doctors told her she had a better than 98 percent chance to recover. But when things didn't improve after a year, they told her that any improvement in her brain function from then on likely would be minimal.

She didn't want to accept the prognosis.

"He said, 'Allison, if I amputated your foot at the hospital, would you look at me and say, 'I'm going to grow my foot back'?" Massari remembers.

After a week spent mourning, she decided she was unwilling to live her life as if it was over.

"It was either spend the rest of life finding a solution or huddle in a ball giving up," she says.

She demanded another evaluation. And they found something.

Her brain stem, the lower portion containing sensory nerves that run between the upper brain and the spinal cord, had been sheared by the force of the second crash. She began a new round of therapy that helped restore much of her functionality.

That's another bit of wisdom she wants to tell: It's OK to push back on your own behalf.

"I still went and received their care for months - I love my doctors - but I also believed I could find a solution to take me beyond where they said I could," Massari said. "I was willing to believe my life could be more. That attitude will make everyone's life better."

* * *

When Massari was in kindergarten, a pottery teacher at her school came to her house to tell her parents that their daughter was gifted as an artist.

He told the couple they could ignore the gift or encourage it, but that "it will keep bubbling up" regardless. Acting on that advice, they enrolled her at an arts school in St. Petersburg.

"I remember clearly on the first day of first grade, my mother holding my hand and us walking into the arts center," she says.

On Friday, the Morean Arts Center on Central Avenue in St. Petersburg will offer a solo exhibition of her work. An opening reception starts at 5:30 p.m. The exhibit runs until Nov. 14.

At 7 p.m. Saturday at the Morean, Massari will take her artistic life in a new direction.

After years of painting and sculpting and creating physical works of art, she'll step away from the easel to become a performance artist and motivational speaker.

The art she'll be sharing? Herself.

Performing a one-woman show, "Memoirs of My Life as a Secret Russian Agent" (a title inspired by a joke between Massari and her father), she'll reveal all the details of her story, no matter how painful. She wants others to learn how they can deal with adversity. How to accept rudeness. How to understand the meaning of pain.

"Life has been a school," she says. "Each of these things presented to me could have appeared unfair. Yes, they were unfair, but they brought me strength that I never could have developed without those extreme circumstances."

Massari will be selling her story on CD that night. She's also working on a book. A majority of the proceeds from the $15 ticket will benefit the Roger Pepper Teen Burn Survivors charity.

Whether or not her story is widely accepted, it's clear that her previous body of work has had an impact.

In August, she received an e-mail from Ashanka Kananda of Clearwater, who found Massari's collage in the permanent collection after visiting the museum's Andy Warhol exhibit with her three girls.

After seeing the nude figure depicted looking out from the canvas, "I had tears in my eyes," Kananda wrote. "I found myself scribbling your name on the museum legend and wondering, 'Who is this woman? She totally gets IT.'

"After reading your bio (gut wrenching), I could feel where the light that emanated from your work comes from," the e-mail says.

"Thank you for sharing your light. I just thought you might like to know how you have touched another's heart. Peace."

The name of Massari's collage?

"The Healer."