The good thing about assisted living at The Hacienda at the Canyon is the time it has freed up for Mary Torrance, who at 90 years old has never dyed her hair. She no longer has to cook nor clean the house. A medical illustrator by trade and a fine artist by avocation, she now uses her time to create.
“I have had such a wonderful experience living here,” she said. “I have the perfect Cinderella home for me. It’s just right. I thought I would die in bed at home like my parents. … I don’t just exist here; I thrive here. I exercise more, have more friends, paint more. I do so many more things.”
You never know who you will meet at a senior living facility. People like Torrance, for example.
Recently, she talked about her career and the art she is creating now.
Trained at Johns Hopkins University in medical and biologic illustration, Torrance enjoyed a long and fruitful career illustrating body parts. She came by her interest naturally.
“Growing up I always loved science and nature and insects and minerals and everything,” Torrance said.
However, her older, college-aged sister opened the door to her future career. One of her sister’s anatomy professors needed illustrated charts for his classes, and he introduced Torrance to medical illustration. She began with embryology, a branch of medical science that focuses on the development of embryos and fetuses, from fertilization to birth. Since all her illustrations were based on real life, Torrance saw things most of us will never see.
“He would set me down at the microscope and teach me the different blood groups and the anatomy of protozoa and parasites and embryologic slides and whatnot,” she said. “I would look in the microscope and draw them. That just clicked, two things I loved the most, art and science.”
A large part of the post-graduate program at Johns Hopkins were the same classes the medical students were taking.
“At Hopkins we dissected a cadaver with the medical students,” Torrance said. “We studied histology (the branch of biology that studies the microscopic structure and function of biological tissues), went into the operating room and would make sketches and come out and work them up.”
Torrance’s work includes a hand-drawn illustration of an eyeball. She used a live model for that, drawing one quarter of the eye and then using that rendering to fill in the rest. It turns out, she said, that the color of the eye determines its surface.
“It’s interesting,” she said. “Brown eyes look totally different. (They) look like little mountains and craters and things and fluffy stuff. It looks so different from blue eyes.”
As an artist, Torrance is unafraid to use materials that might not jump to mind when you think of fine art paintings.
“It’s always been my song in life to sing to give praise to the glory of the variety of God’s creation,” she said. “He didn’t make just one kind of insect, (he made) so many. I love variety.”
She even loves dirt, which comes in lots of varieties.
In one painting, Torrance “used just dirt, no commercial paints at all,” she said. “I ground it up. I filled a wall of baby food jars with all different colors of dirt.”
She even had both green and pink dirt.
Although retired, Torrance is still active as an artist, but she needs inspiration.
“Each thing I do is because I was moved by something in the scene,” she said. “When you paint, you internalize the scene and it’s a conversation between you and the scene. You bring part of yourself to that. You see it in a way nobody else can see it so it’s a living thing between the artist and subject.”
Torrance likes talking about art, but try to get her to smile.
“I nicknamed her Mary, Mary Quite Contrary,” good friend Gail Shelby said.
Torrance said she likes living at The Hacienda at the Canyon because she has the freedom to create and show her work in the community gallery. This is not what she expected.
“Many people fear losing their independence in assisted living, but the reality is quite the opposite,” Torrance said. “We actually thrive here.”
This article appears in Feb 6-13, 2025.
