The years that Maxine Yalovitz-Blankenship spent as a girl behind the counter of her father’s pawnshop — watching customers, hopeful or hopeless, come and go — surfaced years later in her paintings and poetry, as did memories of racism and anti-Semitism.
“My work is embedded in the rawness of a Southern childhood,” she once wrote in an artist’s statement of growing up in Rome, Ga.
“William Faulkner said the only thing worth writing about is the heart in conflict with itself,” she added. “My father’s pawnshop, my mother’s garden, the Black women who raised me, and the prejudices of a closed society is the stuff of which my art is made.”
An artist who could capture the nuances of delicate beauty while never shying from the inspiration that pain brings, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship inspired writers who composed poems that were in dialogue with her work. She was 95 when she died Nov. 22 while in hospice care in Lincoln.
“Maxine was a fierce painter’s painter, a fabulous teacher of immense knowledge on the practice and its history,” said María Magdalena Campos-Pons, a Cuban-born artist who was in the same Bunting fellowship group at Radcliffe College with her three decades ago. “Her work was and is among the best ever coming out of the city in which she painted, drew, and loved for many years.”
Working into her 80s and early 90s, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship “was an expressionist,” said her daughter, Miriam Blankenship of Newton, “but she was classically trained and could really draw.”
“I think she was very secure in herself as a painter, and she loved that,” said the best-selling author Ann Patchett, who also was part of the Bunting fellowship group with Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship.
“She worked constantly,” Patchett recalled. “I went to her studio many times over the years to see her. The quantity of her work, and how different it all was, was amazing and thrilling. And as we get older, having role models who are making their best work as they age is pretty thrilling.”
To close friends she held dear, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship was, herself, a work of art of sorts.
“It seems like the range of techniques in her paintings, mirrored the range of expressions in her face. She had a wide range of expressions, each appropriate to the moment,” said Alan Lightman, a writer and physicist who is a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and a longtime friend.
“I think she, in her life, was just like her paintings: very expressive and warm and witty,” he said.
In “Piece By Piece,” a three-artist show in the Trustman Art Gallery in what is now Simmons University, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship exhibited works that were “gatherings of discrete units, drawn together by the brewing emotions suggested by the paint and cut paper that swirl over their surfaces,” Globe art critic Cate McQuaid said in a 2002 review, when the artist was 74.
“Most of the untitled works feature fields of rugged white and blue textured with sand and written over with dramatic, swiveling gestures in cut black paper,” McQuaid wrote. “Those dark lines not only connect the units but spring past their edges, gesticulating toward the floor and ceiling. It’s a dramatic depiction of what brings groups together — and can tear them apart.”
Born on Jan. 9, 1928, Maxine Yalovitz grew up in Rome, Ga., the only child of Anna Levy Yalovitz and Louis Yalovitz.
Her mother’s family performed in vaudeville until the circuit began to fade, and then her relatives became expert billiards players. Her father, an immigrant from what is now Lithuania, ran Rome Jewelry and Arms, a pawnshop that dealt in musical instruments, jewelry, guns, and much more.
Families stepped through the door to “put their lives in hock,” Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship later wrote.
In a poem inspired by Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship’s childhood, her friend Maxine Kumin, a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, wrote:
… If you’re poor enough
to have to pawn your violin
to pay the rent, the dentist, the electric
bill, the school clothes layaway,
there’s little chance that you’ll make more music.
While waiting on customers, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship imagined what she might someday create.
“She said that really inspired a lot of her interest in art, because she would sit there with all these minuscule things, from guitar picks to rings and little gemstones — whatever paraphernalia people would bring in,” said her friend Ann Levin of Boston, whose family is from Rome, Ga. “She would sit up there on the stool and draw a lot of the little objects.”
Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship also faced bigotry in Rome. “She was Jewish, and that was a big part of her identity in Rome, Ga.,” her daughter said. “There weren’t that many Jewish people in the South.”
After graduating from what was then the Atlanta College of Art, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship received a master’s in fine arts from Pratt Institute in New York City. She wrote that through that time, she “became a commercial artist and teacher to sustain my personal work.”
She also met Alburn Blankenship when he volunteered at a Unitarian Universalist church in Atlanta. They married in 1966.
A broker of risk-management insurance, he was a steady supporter of her work and died in August.
“He knew every fact, every detail,” the couple’s daughter said. “People called him Einstein. My mother was all emotion, the polar opposite. Everything about her was intuition and emotion.”
In the mid-1990s, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship was awarded a Guggenheim fellowship for a proposed project focusing on her father’s pawnshop.
Over the decades, she taught in Georgia, Boston, and Cambridge, and her work is displayed in or is part of the permanent collections of institutions such as the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Boston Public Library, the Danforth Art Museum in Framingham, and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum in Lincoln.
The Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks inspired Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship to organize an exhibition of works by 22 artists to raise money for a college fund for the children of those killed. Two young children were among the survivors of one of her husband’s Boston colleagues, who died that Sept. 11 while visiting their firm’s Manhattan offices.
Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship’s own new work after the attacks was titled “The Mending Series” — paintings on ripped paper, stitched back together.
“The exhibit has to do with mending wounds,” she told the Harvard Gazette in late winter 2002.
In addition to her daughter, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship leaves a son, Aram Blankenship of Marietta, Ga., and three grandchildren.
A celebration of her life and work will be announced.
As gifted at cultivating friendships as she was in her artist’s studio, Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship was “disarmingly sweet in an almost old-fashioned way,” Patchett said. “Any time any good thing happened to me, the first person I heard from was Maxine, calling to tell me how proud she was of me and that she loved me.”
The intensity that Ms. Yalovitz-Blankenship brought to ensuring that such relationships endured may have been a response, in part, to the discomfort of her early years — as, so often, was her art.
“I try to demonstrate in paint the processes from which creativity springs: that high art can come from anywhere, have lowly beginnings,” she wrote in a story featured on her website.
“I want the privilege of sharing the pain and joy with those who already know and profess to those who do not yet know that the core of creative work comes from one’s earliest experiences.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.