Clockwise from top left: Andrea “Pinky” Adubato and Lauren Bellero; a Labradoodle portrait by Pinky; a textured box creation by Bellero.

By TOM CHESEK

The “fall back” days of November bring some positive news on Andrea “Pinky” Adubato, the Red Bank artist about whom we’ve been issuing occasional updates over the past year and change. A favorite Shore area painter for decades  — and an elegant, lovably eccentric presence whose vivid paintings of people and pets were as familiar as her own custom-decorated house and car — Adubato suffered an incomplete spinal cord injury in late 2008 while hiking in New Mexico. She ending up spending more than 15 months recuperating at her daughter’s house in Albuquerque, as husband Gene Goellner shuttled between NJ and NM.

An intensive program of physical therapy (including working with paintbrushes tied to her hands) eventually regained Pinky enough canes-and-walkers mobility to be able to make the long journey home earlier this year, arriving back in Red Bank just in time for the blizzard-bound, cabin-fever month of February.

Through it all, and despite continuing pain, the Pinkster kept her spirit “in the pink,” and a phone conversation from last winter found the artist, as par for the course, focusing her concern instead upon her daughter.

“I came to visit for a week and stayed for 67,” Pinky told us. “She really put her life on hold for me, poor kid!”

Back at work producing new series of sketches and portraits, Pinky resumed her local area art activities as early as March —  and the weeks ahead find her returning to the public eye in a fun little event here in her hometown of Red Bank. That’s just one of several arty happenings going on between Tuesday and the end of the month around the greater ‘green.

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