I Also Do This: How A Plunge Into Painting Saved Producer Denise Di Novi’s Life
An occasional look at the surprising creative outlets of members of the Hollywood community.
Producer Denise Di Novi has been a fixture in Hollywood since she first arrived on the scene with Heathers, the pitch-black comedy that became one of the breakout hits at Sundance when that festival was establishing itself. She has followed with credits including Edward Scissorhands, Message In A Bottle, James and the Giant Peach, The Nightmare Before Christmas, The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, Batman Returns, Little Women, Ed Wood and many others.
Di Novi will reveal another side of herself when she unveils Portal, an exhibit of her paintings beginning August 10 at the Honarker Foundation Gallery in Laguna Beach. The exhibition runs through September 14.
She is passionate about her art, though she cannot really describe her style, because she isn’t trained in the traditional manner. It is just something that bubbles up and comes out of her. What she can say with conviction is, it got her off the canvas at the most difficult moment in her life, providing a creative outlet to process the grief from losing her husband.
That would be Scott Farrow, a satellite engineer whom Di Novi met in the first and only time she tried an online dating app. They soon began making plans to spend the rest of their lives together.
“I’d been married 20 years and got divorced, and a couple years later I met the love of my life, this brilliant guy who built the satellites for Northrop Grumman that go up in the sky for GPS and tracking weather and many other things,” she told Deadline. “I tried online dating for one day and met him, and that was it, and it made me think it was just meant to be. He was really from another world from me. It was incredible to meet someone at that point and have such an amazing relationship.”
Four years into their marriage, Scott was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. He died a year later. There is never a convenient time for the death of a young person, but to add insult to injury, Scott died the night before the world was placed on lockdown because of the Covid pandemic.
That eliminated the usual support group of friends who bring food and a shoulder to cry on during such an unimaginable tragedy. People were dying from Covid in droves, and the world was stricken with fear. Luckily, her adult son Mac had come back from England to say goodbye to Scott. He was unable to return home, and huddled with Di Novi. Otherwise, she was all alone.
“It was complete isolation,” she said. “Everyone was so afraid to see anybody. I’d think, oh, I’m just going to go sit and have a coffee at my favorite coffee shop. It was closed. Everything was closed. So I was completely alone. I had an online grief support group, but that was disrupted a lot because everybody was getting Covid. It was definitely a rough time. But I think because I looked for the silver lining in the isolation, I really was able to appreciate and comprehend how powerful art is. It was all I had really to keep my head above water. I saw, wow, this really is working for me. This is really powerful. And so even in the worst of times, it was helpful. I really learned that lesson and it made me kind of really appreciate and treasure it. It has become a continuing source of healing for me in every way as my life moves on.
“I was in my home in Laguna Beach, very isolated, just as we all were,” she said. “Out of the blue, three days later, I started doing these kind of small, pointless mosaic abstract drawings with colored markers. It was the only time in my career I had no work. I was not seeing anyone. Everything was closed. And it was the only time that I felt like my brain would not explode. When I was painting, it was the only time I felt okay.”
Luckily, her neighbor in the artist colony where she was hunkered down owned an art store, and opened it for Di Novi. She put all the scripts she was developing on the shelf for a bit, and everyone understood her priority should be healing herself.
“I just got some paints and canvas,” she said. “I’d been meditating most of my life. I would meditate and then I would start painting. I just would go into the zone and paint for hours and hours. And I just did so many paintings. Abstract expressionist paintings. A few people started to see them and say like, wow, these are great. They got a real reaction. Long story short, a very prominent gallery in Laguna Beach wanted to do a show.”
Di Novi has kept the death of her husband on the down low, and her budding art career as well.
“The reason I’m doing [the show and talking to you about it] is, I think that I’d like to share the message that something beautiful can come out of your grief, though it seems impossible in the moment. Creativity in any form, whether it’s gardening or sewing or playing an instrument or writing poetry or journaling, creative expression is what I think has been given to us as human beings as the way to heal. There’s no question of that in my mind.
“I think people in our business, we’re all creative, to do what we do,” she said. “Sometimes I think we pigeonhole ourselves. I’m an actor, I’m a writer, I’m a producer. And some of us are more creative in our style than others, but we’re all creative people. And I think I found that the creativity and whatever aesthetic that I learned as a producer and a director, when it became painting, it was like a direct expression for me. It was not collaborative. It was my direct expression of art and creativity. And it’s only enhanced my work as a producer, and a director. It made me appreciate the creative process and opened my mind in more creative ways. And there is a synergy between the two things. So it’s just been a savior to me, and it’s just brought me a lot of joy..”
I’ve known Di Novi since meeting her at Sundance for Heathers 36 or so years ago. I confess that my idea of a great painting is the tin sign that hangs in my bar, the one of the dogs playing poker. But I can see a lot of emotion in Di Novi’s work. She has sold a bunch of paintings, though she declined to say for how much. If some of the paintings seem like a visceral outpouring of grief, it’s because that’s exactly what was going on.
“I never took a lesson,” she said. “I’d never even drawn a circle on a piece of paper. I mean, I would go to an art exhibit and enjoy it, but I was not an art person, and I knew nothing. I didn’t know the difference between acrylic or oil paints. I think that’s part of the reason that my paintings are unique. I did not follow any rules and I wasn’t hindered or held back by any kind of preconceptions of how to do it. I started with acrylics and because I was actually in physical suffering and pain, and I would do the painting in a very kind of tactile, kinetic way. I use a lot of paint. I do layer after layer, and then I scrape it. I use molding clay, and shape it. I write words on the paintings. It’s very intuitive, and I’m very free with it and not attached to any outcome. I’m not trying to make it look like anything.”
Of the paintings that have sold, Di Novi said the money is hardly life changing and there is no pressure for it to be. She already makes a great living from her day job, most recently serving as exec producer on the Steven Knight-created limited series The Veil, which stars Elisabeth Moss.
“I’m a new artist and the paintings are not expensive at all,” she said. “Who knows, maybe someday. But I’m still a producer. I’m very blessed, and I’m also giving a large portion to charity to a place called Selah Care Farm, which is a place for grief therapy that I went to in Arizona.”
I ask Di Novi what might have happened had she been shut away, grieving alone with no outlet during a global pandemic when Hollywood screeched to a halt.
“That’s a really good question because I always say what it did for me, but I haven’t articulated really why,” she said. “I think when we are overwhelmed by really difficult emotions, especially sadness, anger, suffering, and sometimes even joyous feelings….in my case, when you’re really suffering with something really hard, I think it becomes about you trying to figure out, what do I do with these feelings? I think if you internalize them and you do what a lot of people do in our culture, which is stay busy, don’t think about it, keep going, go back to your life, that is a normal reaction. The stay busy thing is really the most common advice. I don’t judge that. If that works for you, it works for you. But the problem as they say in the grief community, if you don’t let it in the front door, it’s going to bang down the back door. I agree. So I think what it did was it allow me to express those feelings in ways that I could not, with words. I think sometimes things are so big that we actually don’t have words for them.
“I finally find the love of my life, and he dies five years later. I think part of it is just surrendering to the mystery we don’t know. Why do these things happen? We will never know, and I just have to…I’ve let go of my old Catholic stuff, but I’ve retained that part of, maybe someday we’ll make sense of this mystery; there’s got to be some kind of design going on that we just don’t understand. We will understand, maybe on the other side.
“Some people write poetry, some people journal and words do help,” she said. “I did that too, but sometimes it’s beyond words. But you want to get it out, you want to express it. And as I was, the painting for me gave me a form of expression so that I was not completely weighed down by holding it in and trying to contain the feelings. And then when I would see the painting at the end, and somehow, I felt like, oh, I see what I did here. That’s what I was trying to do. I was trying to say, I’m drowning, or I’m surviving, or I see another place. I’ve tried to explain this on the website, I did a lot of paintings and someone who really knows about art looked at them. She became one of my first encouraging people, and said, ‘God, they all look different.’ I didn’t think they looked different. She said, ‘I feel like you’re trying to go to the other side. You’re trying to see where your husband went. And as soon as she saw that, I thought, that’s exactly right. I’m trying to see the other side.”