A Painter's Pain- Mike Boone

Laurie Kader, a 28-year-old Montreal painter, lives with a rare genetic disorder that affects the bones and development of her hands and arms.Photograph by: MARIE-FRANCE COALLIER The Gazette, The GazetteLaurie Kader packs a lot of indomitable spirit in her wee battered body.

She is strong enough to overcome cruel irony: Kader, 28, has a rare genetic disorder that deforms the bones in her hands and arms - precisely the parts of the body she needs to do what she does.

But Kader copes. When the bones of her right hand began to fuse due to illness, she forced herself to become ambidextrous so she could keep on painting.

Kader has painted since she was 3 years old. And since the age of 12, she's painted through pain.

"I'm in and out of surgery," Kader says, "and in and out of painting."

Kader has Madelung's Deformity and Leri-Weill dyschondrosteosis. They are genetic disorders that cause bone deformity. The combination is extremely rare: Kader shares it with approximately 700 people in the world.

"There are four doctors who know about the condition," she says, "two of whom have worked on me."

Many have it worse than she. Dwarfism is a common symptom; but while Kader is only five feet tall, she is not a dwarf.

"I'm short," she says. "But 99.9 per cent of people who have this are 4-foot-2."

Were you to walk by Laurie Kader on the street - or visit her, as I did, in the third-floor N.D.G. walk-up she shares with her boyfriend - you'd notice nothing unusual, except for bright red hair colouring that is not commonly found in nature. But her unremarkable appearance and cheerful demeanour mask a life of surgical interventions - 11 since the age of 14, three in the last 18 months - to correct deformities.

After the most recent operation, Kader has a cast from her left elbow to the middle of her hand. There's also a bandage on her right forearm where Kader administers Lidocaine to keep her pain levels down.

"I've become accustomed to chronic pain since the age of 12," Kader says matter-of-factly. That's when her symptoms showed up, the first occurring when she was "pushed into a brick wall and my bones all popped out of their joints."

She and her father visited a succession of Montreal orthopedists, a year-long process that culminated in a referral, from a sports medicine doctor, to the Mayo Clinic. Kader has been treated at the world-famous Minnesota medical facility ever since.

"Your radius is shorter than your ulna," Kader said, explaining her bone deformity. Perceiving that I had no clue, she added "it's very complicated. ... You'd have to read up about it on the Internet."

Rather than Google "Madelung," I talked to Kader about her art.

"I started at the age of 3 and never stopped," she said. "As I grew with my genetic conditions, my art grew as well. It became a collection of work on my journey through life.

"It's difficult at times," Kader admits. "But art is my therapy. If I didn't have it, I don't know what I would do. So it's become my life."

Her work involves the layering and texturing of oil glazing and mixed media, a laborious process that can take six to eight months on pieces as large as 8 feet by 4 feet. Many of her paintings have been sold to doctors. There's something in Kader's art that speaks to them."

But when I asked her to comment on themes in her work, she declined.

"Everyone has to interpret for themselves," she said. "Some people have said it's abstract on a cellular level, Jackson Pollock Meets Alfred Hitchcock.

"It is what it is. You can call it what you want."

Kader works with Earl Pinchuk and Gary Blair of the Art for Healing Foundation, which places art in Montreal hospitals. She will have a January exhibit at the Gora gallery on Sherbrooke St.

After I summoned up the courage to ask, Kader said she didn't know how long she would live. Her conditions are not curable, and the pain is 24/7.

Through all that, Laurie Kader is, for want of a less sexist expression, a great chick. Burdened by affliction that would crush lesser mortals, she's warm, affable and good-humoured.

"Someone told me I should be 45 and dying," Kader quipped. "It would sell more paintings."