E.F. quickly immersed herself in the life of a Midwestern college town in Evanston, Illinois. Due to its close proximity to Chicago, she was often able to visit the museums and the Chicago Art Institute, where her interest in art began. She obtained her BFA from University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana in 1968 and went to graduate school at Boston University on a full scholarship, majoring in painting. At the time, she worked almost exclusively in oils and favored large, over-sized canvases on which she was able to experiment with her free-flowing nature to create abstract expressionist paintings of high emotional intensity.

In the late 1960's, she changed her name from Nancy Ling to E.F. Wen in order to honor both her mother and father. Her mother's maiden name "Wen" is a rare Chinese family name that E.F. and her sister wanted to preserve. She chose "E. F." because her father was instrumental in starting an educational foundation named The Chinese-American Education Foundation (C.A.E.F.). So she and her sister became C.A. Wen and E.F. Wen. However, a Chicago judge refused to let the sisters use initials for their names, so E.F. picked "Erica Felice" from a random list of names presented to her. In this way, she always had a story to regale new-found friends with.

While in Boston in 1969, E.F. met Michio Kushi, the founder of the macrobiotics movement, and moved into the Kushi Institute's house in Boston, working both in the macrobiotic restaurant and in the Insitute's kitchen learning macrobiotic cooking. One attraction of macrobiotics, which became one of her life-long pursuits, was the emphasis on natural, unrefined ingredients, such as brown rice--which E.F. remembered from her days in China when the rice was harvested and cooked immediately, while still green in the husks.



E.F. held numerous group and solo exhibitions in Eugene, Oregon, where she had lived for five years during the early 1970's, as well as in the Washington, D. C. area, and in England. Her large paintings gradually became smaller, as she moved from oils to watercolor, and her work became more concentrated, with details as fine as the lacework she often painted. Always evolving, she studied at the Tobias School of Art in East Grinstead, England in 2001 and subsequently incorporated "veil painting" methods which to E.F. was simply another way to refine the details of her colors into her artworks. While in southern England, she found again the lost environs of her childhood in the open skies (she hated to see overhead wires and wire poles) of the English countryside and in the fields of Emerson College in Forest Row, with their dewy grass and sheep and cows.



Ever the artist, E.F. did not limit herself to her paintings, but turned her house into a vision of a storybook home, filling each nook and shelf with color and delight. One visitor to the house confessed that it took years before she was aware that the stair balusters were painted in a progression of pastel rainbow colors. With her training in ikebana, she also used flowers and plants to create seasonal perishable art pieces for the Christian Community Chapel. One of her many other gifts was her love of writing that seemed effortlessly to connect her emotional insights to crystal-clear prose. During her last year, she kept a diary that ran to about 300 pages before she became too weak to type.

During recent years, even as her health ebbed, she was still in touch with many of her friends, going as far back as her grade school in Evanston and even further back to Shanghai. Perhaps her greatest gift was to make and keep friends for a lifetime. None of them wanted ever to let go of their friendships with E.F., and neither did she forget any of them, their birthdays, or even their locker numbers. Recently, when asked by an old friend how she might recognize E.F. if they were to see each other again after many years apart, E.F. replied, "You can say I've been sculpted by time, and the wind, and the sun, and the stress, and yummy food, and happy memories, and all the encounters with light and darkness."

E.F. passed away January 3, 2010, survived by her husband of 37 years, Eddie Chang and their three daughters: Vanessa Chang of Silver Spring, Meesha Chang and Simon Huegin of Zurich, Switzerland, Tria Chang and her fiancé Justin Chiang of Menlo Park, California, and a grandson. E.F's family has put up a memorial web blog in her memory at www.lingwenren.wordpress.com. She will be missed by all of her family and friends.

--Busy Graham