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By Rusty Hubbard Conway artist Kandie Cudd is photographed with one of her more recent paintings. She has used painting and art to heal from e... + Enlarge

Kandie Cudd poses with her painting titled, The Denial, during an art show in Conway. + Enlarge

CONWAY — Kandie Cudd, 47, said she isn’t ashamed to admit she married and divorced not one but two men who abused her, because that’s not the whole story of the woman she is today.

Cudd is a vivacious hostess at Mike’s Place in downtown Conway and an artist who uses her life’s experiences as inspiration for her colorful artwork.

Most of those experiences aren’t ones she’d wish on anybody.

Cudd, who was born in California and grew up primarily in Oklahoma, was sexually abused by her father and then her stepfather.

“My first memory is 2 1/2, up until we left when I was 8,” she said of her father’s abuse.

One of Cudd’s most vivid memories of the abuse was when she was 3 and her mother was in a California hospital giving birth to Cudd’s sister.

“That was probably the worst experience, the worst that he did,” Cudd said, adding simply: “He had more time.”

Her father told her he was “going to show me how he loved mom.”

On other occasions, Cudd said she doesn’t know where her mother was when her father abused her.

“He always volunteered to give us girls a bath,” she said.

She was 8 when her mother divorced him, but her mother remarried almost immediately.

“He was an incredible stepdad” for about two years, she said. Then he started sexually abusing her.

“I blamed myself. I thought, ‘What’s wrong with me?’”

When she started working through this trauma as an adult, she questioned herself: “‘How come I didn’t stop it? Why didn’t I say no?’ I realize, I was just a little girl.”

Cudd said she and her mother didn’t have a healthy relationship, so she told a friend about the abuse, who told a school counselor.

The authorities came to the home, and both her mother and stepfather were angry with her.

Her mother, who died a couple of years ago, did divorce the man — only to remarry him later in life.

Cudd shook her head, “I know. I know. But, I was out of the house.”

In high school, “I latched onto the first guy who gave me any attention,” she said, imagining a perfect life as a wife and mother.

She graduated in May 1980 and married him in June.

He started physically abusing her, but they had a daughter, Stephanie, and a son, Ronnie, the mention of which make Cudd smile from ear to ear.

Cudd and her first husband divorced four years later, after she left several times, as is statistically typical of abused women.

“I felt so powerful, so confident. I was never going to let that happen again,” she recalled thinking.

She married again, subconsciously picking another man who eventually abused her.

The sexual abuse she suffered “influences how you react to men,” she said.

“I ended up picking men who treated me the same way, with no respect, domineering, abusive.”

Cudd went into her second marriage “so angry,” she said. “I was a ball of anger.”

The last straw in that marriage, she said, was one day when her husband had her on the floor, choking her, and she looked up and saw her teenage daughter’s eyes.

“He said [to her daughter], ‘Don’t worry — I’m not going to hurt her. I’m going to make her pass out and teach her a lesson.’ Looking into her eyes, I was like, I can’t do this again. I wanted my kids to be proud of me.”

The pastor at the church they were attending at the time told her to “go home and be a good wife.”

“I started to question God a lot,” she said.

She left her second husband in 1999, divorced him in 2001, and started working on healing herself and her relationships.

“I was turning 40. I thought, ‘My 40s are going to rock,’” she said, laughing.

Cudd underwent some therapy and tried writing in a journal.

“Every time I started a journal, it was like, how do you put that great big thing on a piece of paper?” she said of her emotions.

She started at Arkansas Tech University to major in art, but she had gone only one semester when another student hit her car with his big pickup. She was injured, and her car was totaled.

She had to quit school, but she found work she could do at home.

One day she was in the floor of her home office, trying to figure out what she was supposed to do with her life.

“I literally cried out to God, because I didn’t know what to do. I said, ‘God, if you don’t do something, I’m not going to last another day.’

“The next thing I know, I picked up a scrap of paper nearby and got a pencil.”

She drew The Unveiling, she called it.

“God showed me it wasn’t him I was so angry at, it was me,” she said.

Cudd said she was angry at herself for the decisions she made as an adult.

“I promised I wasn’t going to make another unhealthy decision, and I did, and my kids were influenced by it,” she said.

However, she said her children are thriving. Her daughter, Stephanie, is a speech pathologist in Gurdon, and her son, Ronnie, just came back from Iraq and is a “gentle man,” Cudd said.

She said God also showed her it was okay “to take baby steps.”

So she drew, and she hid her artwork. At first, she worked out her anger through the art.

“I started using color — that’s when I realized I was getting happier,” she said.

Even if a painting doesn’t start out “happy,” Cudd said “there is such a joy in the fact that No. 1, I can face it, admit it and have the courage to heal.”

Her drawings progressed, and she hung them in her bedroom where no one else would see them.

The central figures in most of her paintings are females, who have the illusion of being nude, but each one is colorful, “sort of like a colored body suit,” she said.

“I love it when people can get past the form of it to the content,” she said.

Sometimes she will find something, “like a feather, or a trinket” on a walk and incorporate those into her paintings.

Her favorite is The Denial, which she drew when she was going through rejection from the church she attended.

“I’ll never sell it,” she said.

Her mother came to visit one time and Cudd offered her bedroom. When her mother took her bags into the room, Cudd heard, “Oh, my God!”

She apologized to her mother about the paintings and offered to take them down, but her mother encouraged her to take them somewhere to sell.

“My mom and I sat on the edge of the bed, crying,” Cudd said, as she explained to her mother the meanings behind each one.

Her mother apologized for not being a better parent.

The last two years of her mother’s life, Cudd said, “we were buddies.”

Cudd said she confronted her father when she was 14, and he denied committing the abuse. “Then he admitted it, but he said it was only once.”

She now has a “cordial” relationship with her father, who is in California, and stepfather, who lives in Oklahoma. She moved to Conway in 2005 and displayed her artwork in a studio that no longer exists, but two of her pieces sold after her first exhibit.

She also has a Web site, kandielandkreations.com.

Cudd said she believes that one day she’ll go back to school, and she’d like to get involved in art therapy — possibly at a women’s shelter.

“I’ve got a lot of healing, growing and learning to do — it never stops. I’m aware that there’s still ... baggage. So I just pull out a piece of paper or canvas, and a couple of hours with me and God, it’s amazing.”

Cudd said she realizes she can’t change the past, but she doesn’t let it define her.

She said she loves her job, her children and is continuing to find her inner strength.

“The best revenge is to survive and be victorious over it. Nobody can take from you what you don’t give them,” she said.