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GREENSBORO —  So vibrantly did Linda Tavernise capture color in her paintings, friends wondered whether she could hear it, smell it, taste it.

Warm yellows, oranges, yellowish greens, orangish reds. Cool blues, greens, blue-greens.

She played them against each other in vivid scenes of nature, animals and people, creating contrasts that led to eye-catching expressions of light.

"She just knew how to paint light," marvels artist friend Jack Stratton. "It almost had a halo effect."

When Tavernise looks now at a painting on her bedroom wall, she sees its greens, blues, blacks and yellows -- but not as she once did.

"It's ironic that I am losing my vision," she says.

Chronic illness from the autoimmune diseases of myasthenia gravis and lupus has colored Tavernise's adult life.

Now 67, in assisted living and using a wheelchair, she hasn't picked up her brushes in the past few years.

"I don't imagine ever painting again," Tavernise says. "I can't see well enough."

Her family and wide circle of friends see much in Tavernise's life and work to honor and celebrate.

On Thursday, they will gather at Green Hill Center for North Carolina Art for the opening of a monthlong exhibition of Tavernise's paintings.

To create the retrospective, collectors have loaned 100 of Tavernise's post-Impressionist-style works, created between 1978 and 2007. Some from her own collection will be for sale.

Friends also have paid for the publication of an exhibition catalog.

Visitors will see oil works on paper, canvas and panel of landscapes, interiors, seascapes, portraits and animals.

They will view scenes from areas as close as the Goat Lady Dairy in Climax and the North Carolina Zoo in Asheboro and as distant as Sicily.

They will even recognize a few Tavernise self-portraits.

If her health permits, Tavernise plans to be there, too. She has been hospitalized four times since March, including last week for breathing difficulties.

"It is going to be absolutely a miracle to look at the pieces all hanging up there together," she says.

Family and friends admire that spirit and courage in the loving and social woman who calls people "babe."

When friends visited her recently at Greensboro Place, they brought her favorites -- sushi and chocolate cake. "The next time, bring bourbon," Tavernise joked.

"Linda is amazingly tough," says her youngest sister, Jo Perry of Cary.

"Despite terrible battles with her body, she managed to make a home for herself for over 25 years and become a productive, creative member of a pretty vibrant artist community."

Sister Lucinda Tavernise says: "She appreciates life so much more because she trying to grab ahold of it and save it up. Every day is such a precious thing. I think that is reflected in her art."

Linda Perry Tavernise's artistic roots stem from childhood.

Before the family moved to Durham in 1953, the three Perry sisters spent their early years in a big Victorian house in the tiny town of Athens, Pa., daughters of a radiologist and X-ray technician.

They watched as their mother, Helen, brought in an artist to give lessons to her circle of friends.

"I like color. I always have," recalls Helen Perry, now 89.

To entertain her young daughters, she set up a playroom with paper, crayons, and National Geographic magazines to inspire and to copy.

"On every vacation, we were given sketchbooks and had to sit down and draw," recalls Lucinda Tavernise, who also would become an artist.

Yet when it came time for college, Linda entered Florida Presbyterian College (now Eckerd College) in St. Petersburg without a clue on a career, until she sat on the library's concrete floor reading E.H. Gomrich's famed "The Story of Art."

"All of a sudden, life opened, and I became attached to the history of art," Tavernise recalls.

But her family life took a blow. Her father died suddenly of an aneurysm. "That was a beginning of a different life," Helen Perry says.

After graduating, Linda went cross-country to California for art studies at what is now Claremont Graduate University.

In California, an exhibition of the work of the late French painter Pierre Bonnard changed Tavernise's art.

She was blown away by his intense use of color in scenes of sunlit interiors and gardens populated with people.

"He was magic as far as I was concerned," Tavernise says. "He took warm colors and cool colors and played them against each other and made everything glow."

She aimed to learn to do the same. Then illness cut her California plans short.

She developed difficulties in speaking. Doctors diagnosed myasthenia gravis, a neuromuscular disease. She moved back to Durham, closer to family and doctors there.

Medication gave her long periods of remission. She met and married Mike Tavernise; sister Lucinda later married his brother.

In 1970, Linda Tavernise gave birth to a son, Paul. She worked as a graphic designer.

But in her 30s, she was diagnosed with lupus, sister Jo Perry recalls.

With the chronic autoimmune connective tissue disease, the immune system attacks the body's cells and tissue. The disease is unpredictable, with periods of remissions and debilitating flares.

At one time, doctors also thought that she might have multiple sclerosis but now don't think so, Jo Perry says.

With separation and divorce, Linda Tavernise came to Greensboro in the early 1980s to finally get that master's degree in art. At UNCG, she would develop lasting ties with a community of Greensboro and North Carolina artists.

The influence of the painter Bonnard showed in Tavernise's interior scenes for her 1985 thesis show.

But she couldn't attend her own show opening. Illness put her in the hospital.

Despite periodic health crises through the years, she continued to pursue scenes to paint, travels that took her around the country and across the ocean. She exhibited and sold her work in galleries across North Carolina and as far away as Kansas.

"The joy, the light, the form, the shape -- I wanted to transfer that to someone else's brain," Tavernise says.

Her creativity came out in cooking, too. Friends and family raved about her gingerbread houses and dishes seasoned with herbs from her garden.

Son Paul accompanied his mother on artistic adventures.

"I went to a lot of galleries as a kid, both willingly and unwillingly," recalls Paul Tavernise, who later studied architecture and now works in digital media in New York.

"We would often have to stop by the side of the road to take a picture of something, which might become a painting. She always had her paints out and a canvas that was a work in progress."

Lucinda Tavernise watched in 1996 as her sister captured a scene of Chaco Canyon ruins in New Mexico with paper and oil sticks.

"She worked quickly to capture the magic of the place, rubbing intense hues into the center as the sun poked through an opening in the rocks, before another cloud dulled the light," she says.

Artist friend Lucy Spencer of Clemmons remembers Tavernise snapping photos of her horses to paint a massive diptych.

"She captured their vitality and personality," Spencer says. "She could dance the colors off each other so yummily."

By 2007, lupus had affected Tavernise's sight. But she was determined to finish a painting for friends Patricia Vedder and Eric Eno.

She called artist friend Jack Stratton for help.

"It's a particularly cruel part of her illness," Stratton says. "Here was a brilliant colorist who couldn't see color."

Painting from a collage of photographs, they finished "Reflections on Giverny" with Eno as the painter Monet in the lush garden scene.

"She was in control of every mark," Stratton says. "She told me what to do, and I tried to faithfully do it."

It was her last painting.

"When you are an artist, it becomes an identity," artist friend Beatrice Schall says. "I think it was very hard for her not to be able to express herself through painting."

Schall and others wanted Tavernise and the public to see just how much she had accomplished. Tavernise had exhibited at Green Hill through the years but not in a solo show.

Green Hill scheduled it for March 2010, then moved it up. Schall helped Green Hill curator Edie Carpenter gather paintings.

Among them is Tavernise's 1986 painting "Van Gogh Wave," loaned by her son for the exhibition. As Carpenter removes it from Linda Tavernise's bedroom wall, Carpenter admires the soft, wavy edges of the painting, and how the sunlit waves flow into the viewers' space.

She wanted to capture the energy, Tavernise explains.

"If I don't get the energy, I don't succeed," she says. "There is so much energy in the water. There is so much energy in the light. There is so much energy in life."

Despite her health battles, hers has been a good life, Tavernise says.

"It has been a challenge, but it has given me treasures," she says.

"With all of the problems I have had, it's been a miracle to me that I am still around, and I'm still moving. I'm still living. And I have grandchildren! It is a gift I never expected."

Did she achieve financial success? No, she says.

But she measures success in other ways.

"I have made my marks with my paintings, and I feel like I have made good marks," she says. "They have made a lasting impression on some people, and that's what I wanted."

Contact Dawn DeCwikiel-Kane at 373-5204 or dawn.kane@news-record.com