Denise Risley

By Heather Caro

Photos by Gordon King

The bustling ICU is alive with alarms, blaring lights and myriad staff rushing to perform their own tasks when Denise Risley, 30, an intensive care nurse at Yakima Regional Medical and Cardiac Center, keys her pass code into the locking doors.  Standing a slight 5 foot 2 inches tall with copper highlights and dark-rimmed glasses, Risley calmly navigates the chaos to a kitchenette, an oversized bundle wrapped in surgical drapes balanced in her hands.

Her entrance draws a small crowd of onlookers as the baby blue papers are drawn back to reveal the glossy modern painting that is Risley’s latest creation.  Textural elements such as glass and metal fill the piece, contrasting painted neutrals with a singular shock of red.  This particular painting is slated for the home of a prominent neurosurgeon in the valley, his name the latest addition to a rapidly expanding list of patrons who have commissioned Risley’s distinctive art.

“My work is sort of random and abstract,” Risley, a Yakima resident, says with a laugh, as she lists the recycled elements she routinely incorporates into her work.  Everything from EKG papers to sawdust, unused sterile packaging from medical procedures to tiny shards of glass from the time her 11-year-old used a slingshot to fling an ink pen through their sliding glass door.  Risley has enlisted co-workers in her search for unusual materials as well, bringing back colored sand from vacation spots around the world.  Pieces such as these are combined with color and other materials to create a look at once modern and uniquely classic.

“Sometimes people want to know what their artwork will look like (before it is completed), but I never know until it’s done,” shrugs Risley.  “I just add and take away until I like how it looks.”  Her patrons must like what they see as well, since Risley, who custom creates each piece after visiting where it will be hung, has more requests than she is able to fulfill.

Risley’s art sprang – as is often the case – from hardship.  Life has not always been rosy for the busy mother of three.  Two years ago, all that was normal came to a grinding halt when her 3-year-old son, Seth, was sent to the hospital for an appendectomy following abdominal pain.  The surgery went well; however, Seth’s blood pressure was abnormally high afterward.  Further testing found a 1 1/2 lb., grapefruit-size-tumor on Seth’s left kidney.  Risley rushed Seth to Children’s Hospital in Seattle, where he was diagnosed with Wilm’s Tumor, a treatable form of kidney cancer.  The tumor and Seth’s entire left kidney were removed immediately, and he began more than six months of chemotherapy.

Though Seth began to recover physically, the surgery and subsequent treatment left him reserved and withdrawn, not the spirited 3-year-old he was before his diagnosis. Unable to walk due to an epidural for pain control, Seth was confined to bed or a red wagon that his parents pulled him in as they walked the hospital grounds.

In an effort to help her son play again, Denise began art therapy with Seth while still in the hospital.  “We had to find things to do with him that didn’t require walking,” says Risley.  Gathering art supplies from the staff at Children’s Hospital, Risley and the staff held up paper for her son and helped him paint.  Framed paintings created by the two during Seth’s hospitalization still hang in their home as a reminder of time spent together there.

As they returned home to begin Seth’s recovery, Risley, without the aid of formal art education, continued painting in part for her own benefit.  “I didn’t have any control over what happened to Seth,” says Risley. “I needed to be able to do something (I could control).”  But what brought Risley’s artwork from personal hobby to a blossoming talent was the chance showing of a piece she had created as a housewarming gift for a group of co-workers.  When her co-workers found out the work was an original and not able to be purchased in a store, a tongue-in-cheek bidding war began.  That afternoon began her journey to a passion and a secondary income that today allows Risley to spend more time at home with her family.

Risley’s artwork has been commissioned by professional offices including The Yakima Valley Youth and Family Coalition and Yakima Neurosurgery Associates, as well as the homes and private offices of prominent colleagues and co-workers from the community.  Yakima Chest Clinic features a painting in its remodeled patient waiting room to celebrate its recent name change to the Lung and Asthma Center of Central Washington. Outside the medical community, her work can be found displayed downtown at Tim’s Downtown Tasting Room.  And during her first showing at Allied Arts Center’s Juried Art Exhibit in July, Denise brought home the Delma Tayor Artist’s Award.  Not a bad resume considering Risley has been showing and commissioning her artwork publicly for less than two years.

Today, Seth’s cancer is in remission and, says Risley, to watch him play there is little indication that just two years ago his health had been in such jeopardy.  Risley’s return to work came with a greater appreciation of her children and a promising career unfolding from a difficult time in her family history.  Her paintings, with found objects from her life incorporated within each design, are a little like Risley herself:  bold and exceptional with an ability to transform what was once broken into a work of art.