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 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. The artist loves bold colors and patterns. She said she’s produced more work in her two years at WAL than she had in the preceding 50 years. “I’m having the most wonderful experience in my life.” “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. Now that she’s 87, it’s all happening for Fonda. She knew from that tender age that she didn’t want to stay on the sprawling barley ranch she wanted to be an artist.

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. It was 1939 and she was a tiny thing who watched her retired midwife grandmother, Chloe Wassum, painting landscapes in oils. The scent of linseed oil and turpentine hung in the air, and 4-year-old Chloe Fonda was mesmerized.