Amy Ford has titled her solo show at the Provincetown Commons “The Open Road” after Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of the Open Road” because it so well describes her own path away from a childhood constrained by severe religion.

In the 1850s, Whitman wrote:

From this hour I ordain myself loos’d of limits and imaginary lines,
Going where I list, my own master total and absolute,
Listening to others, considering well what they say,
Pausing, searching, receiving, contemplating,
Gently, but with undeniable will, divesting myself of the holds that would hold me.

In 2018, Ford, who now lives in Maine, took her first college art class at the University of New Hampshire. She was 48 and had spent her school years doodling in her notebooks at the back of the class at Grenville Christian College in Ontario, where her parents worked as members of the Community of Jesus, a monastic and some would say cultish organization in Orleans with strong ties to the now defunct Canadian boarding school.

In 2020, a Canadian judge found the Grenville College administration guilty of “knowingly creating an abusive, authoritarian and rigid culture which exploited and controlled developing adolescents,” according to Ontario Superior Court documents.

The plaintiffs in that class action lawsuit were 1,360 former students who attended the elementary and secondary school between 1973 and 1997.

“I was always in trouble, and then I never really understood why,” Ford said. “When I was 19, they kicked me out of Grenville. I always thought, ‘What is the matter with me?’ I was just a little kid, and I felt like such a misfit.”

As a teenager, she was sent twice to live for months-long stints at the Community of Jesus’ opulent property at Rock Harbor, where she helped the Italian artist Silvestro Pistolesi paint the frescos that adorn the community’s Church of the Transfiguration. She then traveled with him to Florence and to study classic Italian portraiture.

“He did not speak any English, and I did not speak any Italian,” she said. “For years, I would send him my work and he would send it back with critiques. I was always an artist.”

Ford does not want to dwell too much on her time at Grenville. Her method of pursuing freedom has been to look forward, she said.

Her paintings on display at the Provincetown Commons celebrate this forward-looking freedom. They are unapologetic portraits screaming for acknowledgment. They are big — 5 by 3.5 feet — and loud, with faces emerging from a patchwork of shapes, colors, and textures.

Ford described them as the struggle between “interior reality and exterior presentation.”

“And in a strange way,” she continued, “I think you could say they are self-portraits. It is me finding my way.”

After leaving the community 20 years ago, Ford did not dare to do art professionally. She felt insecure about not having attended college.

“I really had no skills,” she said. “I came up with a cover story for my past. I never lied, but I would obfuscate.”

She and her husband have a seven-year-old daughter, and the casual conversations with other school parents got awkward when a mundane topic, like music, came up.

“We were not allowed to listen to music,” Ford said. “I had a therapist who said you have to read about culture. He said you’ve got to listen to the Beatles and read On the Road.”

Then she took that art class at the University of New Hampshire.

“I finished that course in 2018, and since then I have been working in my studio every day just solving problems — every single day,” Ford said.

A torrent of creative energy seemed to explode from her after two decades of “grief and anger.”

“It comes in stages,” she said. Going through those emotions can feel “like a very unproductive time.” But in fact, she said, her creativity seemed to be waiting for the right moment. “Finally,” she said, “I realized, ‘Amy, my God, you don’t need a degree; you just need to get into your studio and paint.’ ”

Since she started to paint, and following the intense grief over her older brother Randy Steinbach’s death at age 57, everything has changed, she said. She can relate to people and has found it suddenly easy to connect with others, particularly in Provincetown.

“At a recent visit, someone gave me a ticket to see a drag show,” she said. “It was so much fun, but it was also incredibly meaningful to me in a way. I was very moved by it. What I find so meaningful is that freedom — no hiding. There is no cover story.”

‘The Open Road’

The event: An exhibition of work by Amy Ford
The time: Through Aug. 7; reception Saturday, July 30, 5:30-7:30 p.m.
The place: Provincetown Commons, 46 Bradford St.
The cost: Free