Artist Sara Lattis Stone, whose husband Stephen Stone escaped the Deepwater Horizon disaster alive, turned to her craft — painting — as a means of confronting the post-traumatic stress her family endured following the tragedy. In a victim impact statement submitted to the United States District Court, Sara wrote:
I titled the ongoing series Survivors because I believe that all of us, including our families, are survivors of this tragedy on some level or another. Creating these paintings was a therapeutic way for me to deal with the grief of this event. I have never been good with words so this was a way for me to speak to others about what is happening to us. I wanted to show them to you so that you could hopefully see the pain and anger and sadness that we all felt and that we continue to experience daily because of BP’s negligence.
In early spring of 2015, The Great Invisible filmmaker Margaret Brown visited Sara and Stephen to film an update on their struggle to heal five years after the Deepwater disaster. [The film premieres on PBS this Monday, April 20, the 5th anniversary of the tragic event.]
Watch the video:
View Sara’s collection, Survivors, including information about the subject of each painting, in the gallery below.
