John Paul O'Connor

September 22, 2025

I first laid eyes on Lisbeth Firmin in Manhattan at the Algonquin Hotel bar in 1998. It was characteristic, I was soon to learn, for her to suggest such a meeting place. I had answered her ad in the personals of the New York Press in the days before dating apps. Her ad read, “Attractive Artist and Painter. Won’t be on the market long.” It was pure Firmin confidence and cleverness. And since I had known and loved many painters in my life, I couldn’t resist calling her. She chose the Algonquin because it represented a time in New York City that captured her imagination, partly because of her admiration of the Ashcan School art movement. Lisbeth, who died on August 13 this year, ten days before her 76^th birthday, was a painter who was born a painter. A great deal of her art focused on the street scenes of New York City. There was something in her, as she explained it, that saw the world differently than most of us. She was a friend of of Betty Edwards, who wrote Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, and she taught Edwards’ workshops on the book’s methodology. When she learned for the first time about the concept of negative space, she said that that was the way she had always seen things, even as a young child. What was remarkable about Beth, as most people referred to her, is that she lived with a certain way of seeing the world that seemed connected to the way she saw her work. She loved and was often distracted by the visual beauty of the world around her. The first winter we spent in Franklin, she was so enchanted by the splendor of a snow-covered landscape, she once ran her car into a ditch because she couldn’t keep her eyes off it.

Together, we bought the storefront building on Main Street that is now Blue Farm Antiques in late 2000 and began moving in in January. We had agreed to buy a house in the country and searched for months for something we could afford, both of us having limited means. When a photographer named Grazia told Lisbeth that she was selling a place with a studio in Franklin, we both wondered, where in the hell is Franklin? The nineteenth century storefront turned out to be perfect, with a newly renovated studio and a lovely apartment above it. And the village had all the charm of an Ashcan artist’s painting. She immediately took to the diner-turned-artist-studio and fell in love with Franklin and Delaware County. At the same time of purchasing the storefront in Franklin, King Features, where Lisbeth had worked for years, was downsizing. She thought it a good time to transition into working as a painter full time. With the help of a Krasner grant and some money from a deceased friend, Lisbeth achieved her life-long goal of becoming a full time artist.

Lisbeth was self-taught, with no formal education. She left her parents as soon as she was old enough to leave and traveled east to get married to her first husband, Tom Moore. She made a stop in her home town of Paducah, Kentucky to get her birth certificate. What she found was a document with a stranger’s name listed as her mother. She told me the story on the first day we spent together, a trip out to Coney Island. How she had found her real mother after growing up being made to believe her step-mother was her biological mother had all the makings of a Colm Toibin novel, filled with irony, pathos, romance and deception. She and Tom for many years made their living as portrait artists in Provincetown. After they went their separate ways, she moved to New York City with her daughter Autumn, to become a “real” painter. She lived in a rent-stabilized apartment on Sullivan Street, where each morning she went into her studio and painted for two hours before going to her job at King. She was what some would call a “force”. There was never any question as to what her life was about. Her paintings were marvels to look at, forming perfect representations, as only she could, using a minimum of brush strokes. Urban landscapes, as she called them, which often showed people with an anonymous presence in the distance, as if they were part of something much bigger than themselves. They were part of New York, which in her paintings had its own personality. Interestingly, after she moved to Franklin, the people represented in her paintings came further toward the foreground of her work. I had suggested more than once to her that she might try painting portraits; studies of people’s faces, thinking that her painting style and technique would lend itself to portraits in an unusual and compelling way. She seemed to not want to get too close to the subject of people, as if the movement on the street around her figures was as important as her people.

Lisbeth Firmin loved finding the magic in the mundane, both in her paintings and her life. A good example of this were her famous “dog” parties she would throw on New Years Eve, where guests were invited to bring a gift of something ordinary lying around the house. People drew numbers and chose the gifts at random out of a pile of wrapped surprises. A plastic baseball bat or a paper mache owl. A painted waste basket or book of puns. In the nineties she entered Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade costume contest and won first prize with a few of her friends dressed as mussels, designed by Beth. Ironic humor was an everyday feature of hers. When I needed to buy a car for a new job I had, I bought a used Honda Vigor with leather bucket seats from a friend of hers. She teased me that it was my midlife crisis purchase and instead of calling it the Vigor, she referred to as the Viagra. We would drive along in the winter and because she knew I hated heated seats, would reach over to the console and clandestinely turn my seat heater on high. When I began to feel the heat on my fanny, I would look over at the passenger seat and see her with her eyes pointed upward in innocence.

She treated life as an adventure on small and large scales. She was asked by the city of Lima, Peru to show her monoprints and paintings in a public gallery there. She traveled to the opening and I went with her. We visited Machu Pichu, while there, and she insisted that I bring my copy of Neruda’s poems about the ancient city with us so we could read them when we reached the ruins. Having learned of a convent in Arequipa, she decided to stay a week longer while I flew home. She painted the arched architecture of the convent and later created a series of mono prints on the same subject, some of her most interesting and compelling work on light and shadow. Her paintings of Havana from an illegal trip we took there in 2003 were likewise impressive.

It’s common to think of someone’s death, especially from something like cancer, as unfair. Almost a cliché. But in Lisbeth’s case, it is hard for me to think of it otherwise. Her love for life was demonstrated in the way she lived everyday. Everything for her, large and small, was treasured and honored. Her brush strokes performed miracles of illusion that makes the best of representative painting. Moving up close to her work and looking head on, inches from the canvas, you almost see chaos in her smears of paint. Until you back away to see something that makes sense, beauty out of the mundane (like all great painters achieve). Thinking of her untimely passing, I would paraphrase the great poet, Stanley Kunitz’s epitaph on his stone in the Provincetown cemetery: She loved the earth so much, she wanted to stay forever.