UpStArt: Chiaroscuro
+ By Terese Schlachter + Photos courtesy of Joanne Bond
Joanne Bond is a prolific ex-scrape artist. When in a bind, she literally creates her way out. Broken heart? Put the pieces back together in a collage. Illness? Draw it out with a medicinal cocktail of color. Husband dies in the bed next to you (but then comes back to life)? Crochet healing blankets for the masses. Spend a decade in a cult? Okay, that one is a little more complex, but in the end, the piano saved her.
“I wanted to be an art therapist,” says Bond of her early years as an artist searching for a college major that would be more palatable to her father than simply “art.” Then, just as her artwork was gaining some recognition, love took her in another direction.
It was the late 1970s, and Fleet—a tall, dark, and earnestly spiritual man—was her world. She’d loved him since she was 14, so when he decided to join the Hare Krishnas, she went, too, moving into the group’s temple in Potomac, Maryland. Her days began at 4 a.m. with ritual chants and dancing before statues of the deities. Later, there was cooking and cleaning. Rules in the temple kept men and women separate unless they married, so Bond and Fleet got engaged. Then Fleet’s mother stepped in.
“She said she was taking him for a haircut,” recalls Bond, “and I said to him, ‘You’re going to shave your head anyway . . .’” As it turned out, his mother had a deprogrammer (a person who uses confrontation or other more forceful tactics to eliminate a belief or attachment) sitting in a van, waiting for him. That was followed by a deprogramming camp in Minnesota. Fleet never returned.