ENGLEWOOD — Back in October, Gina Battle’s future seemed like a straight line.
The Queens, New York, native was getting her personal life back in order after a failed relationship. She was enthusiastically setting up her new business, Gina Battle Art Studio & Gallery, off Highway 776 on the Charlotte County side of Englewood, and she had six artists eager to display their work on her walls.
Then her own walls caved in.
Battle doesn’t remember much about Oct. 28. She had gone to sleep. A friend in her Englewood home heard her speaking gibberish. Battle heard herself saying “I’m fine,” not understanding her friend’s concern.
She then recalls ambulance attendants “as big as linebackers” taking her to the hospital. Doctors later said Battle had two strokes. They were followed by two surgeries.
Her livelihood, and her ability to help other artists thrive, were washed away like a sandcastle on Englewood Beach.
Currently Battle has difficulty saying — and remembering — important things, such as her three grandsons’ names.
She can walk, but she’s lost much of the use of her right arm and hand, the extremity she has used to create art all her life.
After her October surgeries, she didn’t have a follow-up appointment until early May. Getting there was difficult — changing car gears is a challenge.
Four months ago, Battle had hoped continuing to operate her gallery would help her get back on her feet physically and financially. She also thought being there would provide her with emotional support, and that she could continue creating art. She kept telling herself “I’ve got to get back in. I’ve got to get back in.”
Instead, Battle, who will turn 62 in June, hasn’t made any meaningful art since the strokes. She’s not earning any income and she has agreed to move out of her gallery and studio by May 31.
She’s closing the gallery before she truly had an opportunity to open it.
During her career she has created and sold thousands of paintings.The genre she most enjoys is abstract expressionism.
In 2015, she sold 14 paintings in 11 days at Artisans Atelier in Punta Gorda, where she showed her art from 2013-18.
“That’s crazy,” Battle said.
GRIEVING HER LOSS
The strokes “vastly” changed her life.
“I’ve had so much pain on my dominant side of my body,” she said.
Battle said she is ambidextrous but “it’s hard to use my left hand, my non-dominant hand, to create anything … and that is taking my life away from me.”
She has two adult children and three young grandchildren. Son Desmond James and his wife live in Englewood. Daughter Maya Bishop and her husband live in Tampa.
She also calls her paintings — the ones she’s sold over the years and the ones on the floor, stacked up against the wall in her gallery, waiting to be carted away— her kids.
Battle studied communication in college in New Mexico 40 years ago and moved to Southwest Florida 30 years ago.
She hosted a community radio show in 2016 in North Port and one with iHeart Radio in Port Charlotte in 2017. Both times the theme was to inspire, motivate and empower others, things she can’t seem to do for herself right now.
Battle has even been a freelance writer. But all that creativity, especially the art, seems to be in her past. She doesn’t think she has the potential to fully recover.
“My brain is not working now,” she said. “It is quite depressing.” She recognizes that she’s going through the five stages of grieving her loss.
“I would never compare it to losing a child, something that has never happened to me,” she said. “It’s like I’ve virtually lost my right arm. And, it’s devastating, it’s devastating.”
TURN IN THE BEND
Battle doesn’t know if she is grabbing a bull by the horns or trying to push it up the hill.
“That’s exactly where I have been living in my brain,” she said. “I can’t see the turn in the bend. Is the bend my life or is the bend the next thing around the corner? It’s kind of both.
“How do I get my life going when I’m not making any money and I am the only person that I have to depend on, on a minute-to-minute basis?
“I am a forward-thinking person and I am making plans all of the time. I need to see what is around the corner so that I can look forward to it. Without that information, it’s hard for me, because I always have a plan.”
Before the strokes, Battle always believed there was something positive around the bend. That bedevils her now.
“I knew that I could just reach out, grab it, touch it, get myself on the cover of this (newspaper), or do that,” she said.
“I was pouring into my work. People valued my work as being original and authentic. It’s abstract work so it got a different reaction from everyone. For them to see something in me or in my work, that was very exhilarating for me.”
Now interest in her art has waned. Success seems no longer in reach.
WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?
Battle says she’s never been told — or doesn’t remember hearing — what a stroke actually means.
‘I’ve had two, and two operations within a 24-hour period. I’ve never heard, ‘This is what a stroke does to you. This is what can happen.’”
Battle appreciates the support she receives from friends and family, although she wishes some of them were less “perky.”
The artist has learned that etiquette around stroke patients is an art. Just ask how I’m doing and listen, she said.
Battle’s friends are “optimistic for me. They don’t know what I’m feeling at the moment. They’re telling me how I am going to feel in whatever their timeline is.”
She recognizes that after a stroke, people can become hyperaware of how others treat them, act around them and communicate what is expected of them.
“People don’t realize that when they ask you to pull a rope for five miles, that they really mean 20,” Battle said. “You need to breathe. You have to breathe.”
“People forget how to talk to patients who have had a stroke,” said Jan Riepenhoff, a registered nurse who serves as stroke coordinator at HCA Florida Fawcett Hospital. “A lot of times a patient who has had a stroke can’t speak very well. They can’t articulate what they are trying to say very well because of the disruption in the brain. It’s very difficult to sit and have a conversation with someone who you can’t understand.”
Riepenhoff says the American Stroke Association offers recommendations for how to communicate.
“Get directly in front of them,” she said. “Speak directly to them, but as an adult, not like they are 2 years old. Try to limit distractions around them.”
“It can be devastating,” said Dr. George Ruggiero, chief medical officer at Fawcett. “You’re getting over the physical aspect of it and then there is this whole other psychological, mental aspect. If you are right-hand dominant and it’s your right hand that is affected, your ability to create art or write gets affected and that has lasting implications for how you go about your future.”
Battle’s current conversations with well-meaning folks also have unexpectedly triggered memories of past conversations that now seem inappropriate.
“People would say, ‘Oh, be careful, girl, you’re gonna have a stroke,’ like it’s a headache,” Battle said. “People say it every day. I had no idea how this would turn my life around in a negative way.”
Her grandmother had a stroke when Battle was 15. Her family tried to hide the details about her Grandma’s condition from her. No other close family members have had strokes.
“It’s a nightmare,” she explained.
Day after day, Battle says, her memory and use of her arm are improving, slowly, in flashes. While she’s sleeping, she knows the nerves in her arm are rebuilding and connecting.
But she still struggles remembering the step-by-step process she previously went through to create a painting.
Even so, Battle “got the biggest surprise” of her life when Rosa Benghtt asked her to display her art in The Creator’s Gallery, which opened in May in Punta Gorda.
“I have been so far out of the loop I didn’t even know she had opened up a gallery,” Battle said. Battle and Benghtt have known each other for 15 years.
Battle doesn’t know if she’ll ever pick up a paintbrush again. She may try, and succeed by her standards. She may try and fail.
For inspiration she looks to a quadriplegic artist, Marcus C. Thomas in North Carolina, who paints with a paintbrush in his teeth.
“He found a life after his injury,” Battle said. “He’s an incredible man.”
Before her strokes, Battle’s art was an expression of how she saw the world through her unique lens.
“There has to be a light at the end of the tunnel,” she said. “There has to be, with all the stuff that I’ve done in the community, and started to implement here at the gallery. I know there is a whole lot for me.”
Recently an art collector from Punta Gorda bought one of her pieces, increasing her hope for the future.
“What I’ve learned in this process is, although we know that nothing comes easy, and it doesn’t matter what you’ve done in your past and what you think is going to happen… it has to get better.”
She is learning to be patient, calm.
“I don’t know what the next ‘thing’ is, but I have to sit still and listen,” she said. The strokes “put my butt down.”
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