That was the first of many times I felt a tingly feeling of dread all over my body. As I waited for her to call me back, I felt conscious of each breath, each heartbeat, each hair, and pore. It was as if my senses were heightened, and my body was preparing for a fight.

I was a healthy 32-year-old. That Friday morning my mind had been focused on the painting I had been working on, hanging out with friends, and doing some Christmas shopping. But I realized at that moment that everything was about to change.

After the second call, after letting myself cry for a good while, I turned around and drove back home. The hardest part was explaining to my family why I wasn’t going to work: All of my blood counts were abnormal, I had to say; I was being referred to a hematologist—a doctor who specializes in blood disorders—that afternoon.

I didn’t let anyone come with me to the appointment. I didn’t want to burden them with what might happen, but I also did not want to feel responsible for anyone else’s feelings. I thought, wrongly at the time, that I had to face this on my own.

The severity of my diagnosis hit during that first bone marrow biopsy. Even though I was numbed up, I could feel the pressure on my pelvis when my doctor put her whole weight on my body as she tried to scrape a sample from the center of my bones.

I was diagnosed with Acute Promyelocytic Leukemia (APL). It was important, I was told, that chemotherapy start right away. I remember being reassured that APL, once the most aggressive and deadly Leukemia, was now the most curable. Although that was nice to hear, it didn’t really mean anything to me at that moment. Cancer was still cancer.

I like to be in control, and I like to get things done. It’s part of my personality: When I want to do something, I know I can rely on myself to get it done. And I’ll do it. So at that moment, to realize I no longer had control over what was happening with my body was disorienting. I felt betrayed and blindsided by my body—and by my blood.

They wheeled me to a chemotherapy clinic right next door, where other patients were receiving their treatments. I remember the faces of patients and nurses who turned to look at me. My eyes were puffy from crying, my hair was a mess. I’m sure I looked terrified. I saw a lot of empathy in their eyes, but I couldn’t reciprocate or respond to their kindness. Usually, when someone smiles at me, I smile back, but I was too miserable to engage at that moment.

I was admitted to the UCLA Ronald Reagan Hospital, where I stayed for 25 days. My time there was the worst part of my experience. I was trying to come to terms with my diagnosis while going through the extremely intense medical treatment. It was sensory overload. In the beginning, they woke me up every two hours to check my blood. All the beeps, all the sounds, the lights, the uncomfortable bed, everything that I wasn’t used to—it was just terrible. But comfort wasn’t the priority; they were trying to keep me alive.

When I first was diagnosed with APL, I’d resisted leaning on others. While I was in the hospital, though, I realized I had it all wrong. My family and friends became regulars around my hospital bed. My mom, in particular, stayed with me every night I was an inpatient.

Strangers also came to my aid. I am forever indebted to people who took time out of their lives to donate the blood products that saved my life, allowing me to stay healthy while the chemotherapy did its job.

Then I was discharged and received outpatient chemotherapy. For four weeks, I’d go in Monday through Friday for infusions. I’d have a month off, and then repeat the process again, for a total of eight months.

My dad went to all my infusions with me. The few times he wasn’t able to go my brother went instead. It was like having a job. Every morning, I’d wake up at 6 a.m., and eat breakfast so we could get there around 7:30. They did blood tests, and checked how I was doing every Monday. They’d also do an EKG just to monitor my heart because one of the drugs can be really hard on it. If I was good to go, I had an infusion, which took about two hours, with the prep time and the other thing they had to give me added in. It sometimes took longer than that, and I’d fall asleep. Sometimes I’d draw or knit or crochet or embroider to pass the time, but mostly I’d just try to sleep. It was usually lunchtime—1:00 or 1:30 p.m.—by the time I’d be allowed to leave.

Once I started responding to the medicine, and my body started to heal, I got a little bit calmer with the whole situation. I just treated it as, “oh, well this is what I have to go through, I just have to do it”—just like if I were to have a job or have a project due or a painting due—if this is what I have to do, I just have to do it.

When I finished treatment and my cancer was in remission, I was invited to be part of a four women group show entitled “KIN” at the Center for the Arts in Eagle Rock along with artists Frieda Gossett, Ranee Henderson and Ming Ong, who also curated the show. Each of us was asked to interpret what kin meant. And as I thought about it, I decided to do something on my treatment and my family’s support and care throughout it.

I usually do very figurative work. Figurative can mean literal: It’s a representation of something. If you draw a figure, the viewer sees it as ‘a figure,’ that can’t be mistaken for anything else. But I started doing red paintings with red ink. The art was abstract, which is odd for me to do—dots and dashes and lines and circles—just the shape, basic shapes. But it felt like getting back to the basics, almost like relearning things about myself, and about how I experienced life. It felt less restricted, more free. The red, I realized, also looked like drops of blood.

As I worked, I started thinking about my family, and how they supported me while I was there. Each of the six large red paintings I did came to represent a particular family member.

I did another group of paintings about the 110 infusions of the chemotherapy drug, Arsenic trioxide, that were needed to save me. I made 110 smaller paintings: one to represent each infusion that I had. Some of them are representational, some are portraits, but the majority of them are abstract. There’s no beginning or end with those; just however I was feeling at the time.

This collection of work gets at what was happening to my body, with all of these blood cells, and platelets, and hemoglobin, what have you—all the parts of blood. Healing, and getting better, and not only from the drugs, I think, but from my family, whose support also helped me heal.

This association might not be noticeable to anybody else, which I don’t mind. I like people projecting their own interpretation and seeing what they want to see in the painting. I love that about art. You make your own connections.

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Martin is best known for her sublime abstract paintings of grids and lines, which at first glance may look like hand-drawn ledgers. Her early work from the 1950s and 1960s is mainly black, white, and earthen tones. In her long career, Martin did not solely rely on a monochromatic palette—she went into color, in a subdued way, in the 1970s—but she did return to it again and again.

After seeing “Agnes Martin,” the breathtaking retrospective of her work at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (through Sept. 11), a show that reminded me of the extraordinary beauty and discipline of her art practice, I wanted to explore some possible reasons why.

I found a clue in the opening lines of “The Untroubled Mind,” Martin’s thoughts from 1972, when she was returning to making art again after a hiatus of several years. These thoughts were recorded like a poem, in phrases, and read like a quiet but self-assured manifesto.

People think that painting is about color
It’s mostly composition
It’s composition that’s the whole thing.
The classic image—
Two late Tang dishes, one with a flower image
one empty. The empty form goes all the way to heaven.

The reference to the Tang dynasty of China is not accidental. In her writings and interviews, Martin often cited the strong influence of Asian philosophies. “My greatest spiritual inspiration came from the Chinese spiritual teachers, especially Lao Tzu,” she once said. Lao Tzu (now Laozi) has been generally accepted as author of the famous Tao Te Ching and founder of Taoism. In the same statement she also mentioned the influence of Buddhism, especially the Zen branch. Scholars can only conjecture as to where she picked up this knowledge, but it had a deep impact on her painting and her discipline.

Later in life Martin repeatedly spoke of the need for humility and ego-lessness, which is in sync with Taoism’s call for naturalness and simplicity. And as an adult, she meditated regularly, a Zen practice. She advocated looking inwards and of emptying the mind, tenets of Zen monks, some of whom became known for their monochrome painting. (She famously refused to accept awards or honorary degrees because, she said in an interview, “I don’t really think I’m responsible, so I don’t accept any awards.”)

In the late 1950s, Martin had moved to New York City at the urging of her dealer, Betty Parsons. However, she left in 1967, packing up her things and going on a road trip for 18 months. She eventually settled in New Mexico, and reducing the distractions of daily life—diagnosed a paranoid schizophrenic, she had had more than one breakdown while in New York. In 1973, she announced her return to the art world with a series of 30 monochromatic screenprints, “On a Clear Day.” Each print is composed of thin black lines in grids or horizontal lines. “These prints express innocence of mind,” she wrote in 1979. “If you can go with them and hold your mind as empty and tranquil as they are and recognize your feelings at the same time you will realize your full response to this work.”

In this latter period, she often said that her work was about happiness, perhaps her way of describing inner peace. I find that looking at her work demands focus and shutting out distractions. Your eye swims around the soft lines, simple forms, and translucent pastel colors, until your mind finally comes to rest. The newly re-opened San Francisco Museum of Modern Art very deliberately sets her work apart, presenting seven of her paintings in an octagonal room, with seating in the middle, a kind of Martin “chapel” which facilitates quiet and contemplation.

Basic black-and-white drawings and paintings show composition most clearly. She must also have appreciated Chinese brush painting, which is traditionally done with a soot-based ink with highly flexible brushes. Arne Glimcher, her longtime dealer and friend, recalls in Agnes Martin: Paintings, Writings, Remembrances that in the 1980s he had sent her a book on such work. On his next visit he saw “a series of grey canvases, each with diluted India ink washes under pencil grids, some with horizontal lines and others with vertical and horizontal lines.” Martin said to him, “Imagine yourself one of those little Chinese men in a brush painting and get into those boxes and look around.”

She did take up color—pastel washes worked into bars and grids, perhaps a reflection of the New Mexico sky and landscape. Still, I find it interesting that towards the end of her life she went back to the monochromatic palette in such important works as “Homage to Life” and “The Sea,” both from 2003, a year before she died.

In the latter, the black is intense, and the composition insistent—it is mostly black, with thin white horizontal lines pulsing across the large, 5-foot-by-5-foot canvas. Something in the slight irregularity of the white lines gives them a sense of movement, of surging rhythm, as of ocean waves that can be ever changing and yet patterned at the same time. It’s true, Martin had long avoided representing the outside world, and was more concerned with the truth within. Still, I do not think she could turn her back to the world completely—she just had to represent the elemental in her own way.

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