By Angeli Rasbury
As a little girl growing up in Honduras, Darla Ebanks painted chakras. She did not know that what she was creating in her school books was the body's energy centers.
She doesn't know how the chakras became etched in her mind and art. She probably hadn't seen images of chakras or Buddha. Yet, she continued to paint the energy sources until she was 11 or 12. By then, painting them had been beaten out of her, around the age schooling ended in her birth country.
Ebanks, 74, immigrated to the United States from Honduras with her family when she was 16: "Honduras is a very poor country," she said. "When I was growing up, I didn't know that museums existed."
Thee only reading material in the home, she added, were the Bible and Seventh Day Adventist quarterly magazines. And she doesn't remember seeing any newspapers. One of her neighbors had a radio. "We'd listen to that," she said.
When she was on her way to this country, Ebanks saw a television: "That was my first time to have a medical examination, my first time seeing a television. That was a lot of firsts."
Within months of arriving in New York, Ebanks had a full-time job at Brooklyn Jewish Hospital and attended night school to get a high school diploma. Ebanks made her rounds in hospital labs, spending time in various areas, and eventually started buying houses.
After retiring from real estate, she says, "Something would wake me at 3 o'clock in the morning and it would not let go."
She mixed white house paint with tints, a technique she used while in real estate to create colors, to paint her first work since girlhood around 2006. It's on three doors. Ebanks continues to paint large scale.
She doesn't feel she can say what she has to with small works, which she paints occasionally. What is it she wants to say with her work?
"You're here... to get to know yourself. You may get diverted and turned in the wrong directions and hopefully there'll come a time when your inner self is so strong that you can't ignore it...You have to follow that. "
"I'm doing what I want to do, and I'm loving what I'm doing," she says. "And I have the courage to say this is good."
By 2021, Ebanks had a body of work she believed was good, though she didn't always have the courage to say so. She heeded a friend's advice and opened MY Gallery NYC at 587 Franklin Ave in Crown Heights.
MY Gallery NYC has exhibited Otto Neals, Larry Weeks and emerging artists. Ebanks says to be able to show work by artists who have the same insecurity she had (the lack of courage to say their work is good) and to witness them open up when they see their work on a gallery wall is the crown.
Ebanks wants the gallery to be a space for established artists and artists whose work has not been shown in a gallery and to have her art to be shown in other galleries.
