Comfort can be found in the familiar and for artist Kathy Gergo, being surrounded by her art and those who admire it is a consoling gesture.

Attic Gallery owner Lesley Silver is hoping to create that sense of comfort for Gergo, a New Orleans transplant, who has been diagnosed with brain and lung cancer.

Friday, Silver will hold an exhibition of Gergo’s most recent show entitled “Transition,” a title Gergo decided on after having a foreboding feeling her life was about to change.

“Little by little it appeared, not unlike an approaching dark storm cloud…

Uneasiness was settling on my chest, there were no other signs to decipher the reason of this gloom. As the days went by, I became more and more certain, that I did not have much more time left,” wrote Gergo in the artist’s statement of “Transition,” which ran from Oct. 14 to 31 at the Academy Gallery at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts on Magazine St.

Since this statement, Gergo was diagnosed with the cancers and is living at the Vicksburg Convalescent Home.

Gergo wrote using “Transition” as the theme of her show came after searching for a way to describe the uncertainty of the change she felt was coming, while also capturing the change in nature she was painting.

“As I looked around, I saw the world changing, crumbling, becoming something different and amazingly new. Visiting sections of the Natchez Trace gave museum-like examples of transition through the ages along with the season colors, and textures. Just three weeks later, though, the spring foliage was hiding it all from view,” Gergo wrote. “Yet, I knew, the changes kept going on. Not always the same way, but constantly.”

Unlike her prior artwork, Silver said Gergo’s newest pieces elucidate color in a manner that she has not used before.

“It’s like she has gone into a different place. I don’t want to say a dark place, but it’s like she is looking for color in a different way than she did before, because if you look at her painting up close they are abstract, but if you get back from them they are not,” Silver said.

Silver said Gergo would be present for Friday’s exhibition that will be on the third floor of the Attic Gallery, and will run from 5 to 7 p.m.

Gergo is a native of Hungary. She came to the United States in 1957 and lived in New Orleans for 45 years, where she taught privately for 10 years before joining the faculty at the New Orleans Academy of Fine Arts.

Gergo moved to Vicksburg after Hurricane Katrina, but has been exhibiting her work at the Attic Gallery for more than 20 years.