NJ DeVico didn’t want a funeral. She wanted a party.
So on Aug. 18, a little more than a month after cancer finally claimed her, family and friends gathered at the Titusville home she shared with her sweetheart to celebrate the life of a truly one-of-a-kind artist.
“The walls were covered,” said Lucia Stout, a friend and fellow artist who was in attendance. “There wasn’t an empty space.”
Friends knew DeVico for her wry wit, which was on display in her obituary, which she wrote.
“Norma Jean DeVico, born Aug. 24, 1956, an artist and writer of Titusville, died at University of Pennsylvania Hospital on July 11, 2018, laughing to the end. She leaves behind many people she loved. You know who you are. DeVico was pissed because she was finally getting it together artistically; however, she’s glad she’ll never have to wash the kitchen floor again … Oh, and she’d like you to keep in mind that if you wake up in the morning, it’s a good day. Goodbye, Norma Jean.”
DeVico earned a Master of Fine Art degree from Brooklyn College, then worked for a number of years as a corporate art director before settling into life as an artist. She was first diagnosed with cancer in 2005, at the age of 48. Unfortunately, that was only the beginning of her long struggle against the disease.
In 2012 she underwent a failed bone marrow transplant that incapacitated her for more than a year. In recent years, she was up against acute myeloid leukemia. The prognosis was the worst, but she outlived it by two years. “She was so good at beating the odds,” Stout said, talking to me by phone a week after the party. “I got used to thinking she could find a way.”
After recovering from the marrow transplant, DeVico became more produtive than ever. She exhibited work in a variety of media in more than 15 shows over the last three years. In 2017, she was among a number of local artists whose work was part of a show at Capital Health Hopewell called “Healing Art Stories.” The common thread among the artists was “art, hope and healing.”
At the time of her death, her works were on display at the Alfa Art Gallery in New Brunswick. She posted photos of six newly completed works on social media in June alone.
“She was a hardworking woman,” Stout said. “I would call her up and say let’s go for a walk, lets have lunch. Sometimes she would, but sometimes she would say, ‘I can’t, I’ve got work to do.’ She never wasted time. And of course, she knew she had a very limited time.”
Stout, who raises grass-fed beef on Beechtree Farm in Hopewell with her husband Charlie Huebner, met DeVico through mutual friends Maria Nicolo and Nina Moucova in 2006. DeVico had a notecard business called Teak’s Unique Cards, through which she sold notecards illustrated by the works of artists she knew. When she saw Stout’s work, she invited her to join the collective. When people would buy cards featuring Stout’s or any other artist’s cards online or at retail venues like Pennington Quality Market, DeVico would pay them royalties.
“That’s a very very important part of who NJ was,” Stout said. “She encouraged people to pursue their art in many different ways. She fostered artists and actually helped a lot of people become artists. The card business was just one of the ways that she did that.”
Stoud said DeVico was fascinated by every aspect of art, from creating it to marketing it to selling it. “Doing the art was not enough for NJ,” she said. “She encouraged people to do shows. She got me going to about 10 different shows.”
Though Stout had exhibited her art before, she admits that she had lacked some confidence when it came to the artist word. “I was constantly considering that I was still learning as an artist,” Stoud said. “And she sat me down and said, ‘You are an artist, now it’s time to work. Artists are always learning. That’s the nature of being an artist.’”
DeVico would work as a curator, finding places that could be good venues for artists and then approaching them and convincing them to let her display some art. “She was just a generator of ideas and of opportunities for artists,” Stout said.
DeVico enjoyed helping other artists set up their exhibitions. She would help them choose their works and mount them, design invitations and send them out. “She was doing this because she was interested,” Stout said. “She wasn’t trying to make money or anything. I would say, ‘You’re not charging me enough.’ It’s not like she was personally wealthy. She did a lot with a little.”
Some of DeVico’s pastels were of Beechtree Farm, and Stout said they would occasionally do plein air work together, though not as often as she would have liked because DeVico was often busy with volunteer work, teaching at places like Artspace, in Trenton, or at the YMCA.
In the last few years, Stout would occasionally take DeVico down to Philadelphia for infusions or chemotherapy. “Every single person we encountered, she clearly was friends with,” Stout said. “People at the garage, at the door, the desk, the nurses, the doctors. Clearly they all just loved her. I think it’s hard on the people down at UPenn hospital. They’re going to miss her too.”
A year ago February, DeVico asked Stout if she wanted to go with her on a trip to Paris. “I was like, ‘Oh gosh, I’m a farmer,’” she recalls saying.
Another friend convinced her to go, so she did. They spent a week in Paris on an extended museum crawl.
“I’m so grateful that I did that with her. She was a wonderful travel compananion. She would bring cards with her and if she met someone—she always talked to everybody—she would give them a card as a gift,” Stoud said. “And she packed some of my cards so I could do the same thing. That was the kind of thoughtful person she was.
“We had so much fun and it wasn’t wasn’t too expensive. She traveled quite a lot. She really packed into the last few years. She packed a lot in her life, period.”
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Late last year, local Ragged Sky Press published a book entitled, Go Deep: Poetry by Steve Nolan, Pastels by NJ DeVico. The book features 53 poems by Nolan, who had been diagnosed with multiple myeloma, and 53 pastels by DeVico created in response to Nolan’s poetry.
DeVico didn’t write for the book, but Stoud said she was a good writer who had once thought about writing a novel.
“You can see her talent as a writer in the titles of her paintings,” Stout said. “She had an amazing sense of humor. Her personality shows through. She wasn’t cynical, but she was very honest. That was one of the reasons it was such a joy to be her friend. She was a wonderful person to critique your work. She would always be straight if something needed work. I’m so missing that. I mean I miss her all over the place, but especially that.”
When artists are accepted to exhibit in gallery shows, they are usually asked to submit an artist’s statement to accompany their visual work. Often these are conceptual ruminations about the nature of art and process. But DeVico’s statements were often blunt, ironic and full of humor.
“When I was five years old, drawing in the pediatrician’s office, Doc Gittelson told my mother, ‘Make sure that kid always has arts supplies,’” she wrote for the Alfa show. “Suddenly paper, glue, tape, colored pencils, paint and—my favorite—crayons, appeared. I felt like I died and went to heaven.
“I’ve been a printmaker and a watercolorist, I’ve made collages and oil paintings; I worked in chalk pastels. And here I am, decades later, playing with crayons again. So what if my fat Sennelier oil pastels cost $9 a stick? I’m just as happy as I was with those Crayolas.
“When I work—actually, it’s more like play—I go into a zone and don’t worry about a thing. And I’ve got enough to worry about: I almost died after a bone marrow transplant didn’t take. Curiously, that’s when I got comfortable doing abstracts. It was the first time I didn’t care if someone might say or think, ‘My five-year-old can do that.’
“Yup, when you realize the end could be near, you don’t give a damn about a lotta things that you wasted time on before. It’s quite liberating. I think it shows up in my art. I feel like the satisfaction of doing those pastel drawings is guaranteed, or my money back.
“It always gives me pleasure and calms me down. Not only while I’m drawing at night, but also when I look at my picture the next morning. I often think, ‘Wow! I did that?’ (I suspect I’ve got elves in the house who doll up my pictures as I sleep.) I’m not unlucky because I’ve got leukemia. I’m lucky because I’m an artist.”
In her obituary, DeVico asked for donations to be made to the NJ DeVico Scholarship Fund at Mercer County Community College in lieu of sending flowers. Checks may be sent payable to MCCC Foundation and mailed to P.O. Box 17202, Trenton, NJ 08690.
NJ DeVico,
