RIP Dear D..

An Instagram posting on Dorian Allworthy suggested bad news.

https://www.instagram.com/p/Cz4QRGDgATc/?img_index=1

And she hadn’t posted on Facebook for a long time.

But I could find no death notices, obits, nothing. Her Wikipedia entry still has her as living.

Now, one of her friends confirms she did pass away last July.

We had become an item during the year I spent at the U of C., and when I moved to NYC, she pretty much turned my apartment into a Galerie Dorian. I posed for her twice. (Decades later, I will be silent about the details).

To say she had a strong personality would be an understatement.

Uber talented and hardworking, she lived in an anachronistically magical townhouse in Chicago’s Gold Coast, with a glass-encased phone booth in the foyer, a painter’s studio on the top floor, an etching press in the basement, many fireplaces, every wall covered with paintings, some by her adoptive father, a couple of old masters, and then scores, hundreds, of her own (some crammed into closets). She didn’t sell much – and for better or worse, because of a trust fund didn’t have to.

Eventually, I believe the Chicago townhouse went to seed – perhaps the finances weakened – or maybe after she acquired a farm in Southern Illinois, she lost interest.

I’m not sure she ever finished high school and left the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts after three years. But she had a prodigious memory and read anything and everything.

She was estranged from her biological parents, and her adoptive father died in the 1990s. No children, no former or current spouses, and though she knew practically everyone on the Gold Coast, I see no record of a memorial service. All she leaves behind is her unsold work – and god knows what will happen to that.

But as Dorian frequently used to say, quoting Ecclesiastes, “All is Vanity.”

Pray you have found peace, dear D.