SACRAMENTO, Calif. >> The scent of linseed oil and turpentine hung in the air, and 4-year-old Chloe Fonda was mesmerized. It was 1939 and she was a tiny thing who watched her retired midwife grandmother, Chloe Wassum, painting landscapes in oils. The namesake granddaughter was destined to be a San Joaquin Valley farm girl, but Fonda loved the magic trick of making a blob of pigment into an image. She knew from that tender age that she didn’t want to stay on the sprawling barley ranch; she wanted to be an artist.

Now that she’s 87, it’s all happening for Fonda.

“If there’s a moral to the whole story, it’s never give up,” Fonda said, sitting in her studio in downtown Sacramento’s Warehouse Artist Lofts, known as WAL. “I’m having the most wonderful experience in my life.”

She said she’s produced more work in her two years at WAL than she had in the preceding 50 years.

The artist loves bold colors and patterns. In one series of mixed media works, she painted still lifes of fruit and then stuck on real fruit stickers — it’s not just a banana, but a Dole banana. In a portrait of her husband, James, playing cards at their kitchen table, Fonda includes, at the bottom of the canvas, her own perfect cribbage hand, about to trounce him. In the background, she painted the clipboard that they really use to keep score of their daily card games.

Sidelined from studio

Fonda and her husband spent two years on the waitlist for their subsidized, light-filled apartment. She’s waited for opportunities before. In the 1950s and ’60s, Fonda put off art school for over a dec­ade. She spent a year in Oakland at the California College of the Arts. But after two semesters, she went back to the San Joaquin Valley and got married. She had two sons and devoted herself to “being the perfect mother.”

She’d watched her beloved grandmother find time to paint in her retirement, only after her husband was gone. She knew her grandmother learned to paint in the first place only because she’d been “a spinster” who remained single in her 20s. Knowing this, Fonda kept her year at art college in the back of her mind. When Fonda was around 30, she left her husband.

She recalled, “I filed for divorce, I woke up the next morning, I thought, ‘I gotta go back and finish.’”

Fonda got her degree in 1969 and became a graphic designer. Then she married James, a family law attorney, and moved into a Victorian house in Alameda, where they lived with their sons from her previous marriage; their daughter was born in 1973. They converted the attic into an art studio.

When the couple later moved back to Oakdale to be closer to their parents, they bought a property with a chicken house that had been converted into an artist’s workspace.

But Fonda never had much time for art — the house was on 2 acres, with a huge yard and a rose garden she tended. She had to traverse a plethora of planted distractions just to get to her studio.

Finally, an artist’s home

When the Fondas’ daughter, Gioia Fonda, suggested they move to Sacramento into an “artist loft,” it seemed like a great idea. WAL, they thought, would give Fonda a chance to meet other artists. In 2020 they got rid of the stuffy old china that Fonda always hated and filled their new kitchen with vibrant ceramic Fiestaware.

Gioia is an art professor at Sacramento City College, a point of pride (as Fonda put it, “I raised — we raised — another baby artist”). Gioia made calling cards with a cartoonish illustration of the couple and handed them out to friends in the building.

Because of the ongoing pandemic, Fonda hasn’t met as many fellow artists as she’d like, but she does get recognized in the elevator, on account of the calling cards. She opens up her studio every first Friday, asking people to wear masks because, as a sign by the door said in July, “Chloe is really an old lady.”

Over her lifetime, Fonda said, art has “always been just kind of like a hobby.” She still thinks of herself as just playing around and learning. “I’m just trying to figure it out,” she said. “I’m 87 years old, so I don’t have any time to waste.”