She wasn’t looking for survivors, though. She was looking for meaning amid the horror.

In the days following the events of Sept. 11, Puiatti, a painter, walked through the breezeway of her home in Chelmsford and into her studio. There, she turned on the radio, soaking up the news, working updates into four abstract oil paintings.

Each of the paintings – titled Sorrow, Anger, Hope and Fear, in the order they were created – captures an emotion, using color, line, shape, texture and even blankness.

“Because of what happened, this is what happened,” says Puiatti, 46, sitting amid the large canvases in her studio. She calls the works “my darkest emotions and deepest fears.”

Puiatti remains haunted by the attacks, still a little uncertain if she is ready to show the works, which are so different than the soft, gentle washes of landscape she usually paints.

“Fear,’ the last one, is so awful I’ve been keeping it in a cupboard,” she says.

It took her two days to show even her husband. Part of Puiatti wants to hide the four canvases. But she’s curious to know how other people, especially artists, are responding to the terrorist attacks.

Puiatti will include the four works in her first show, which will include dozens of paintings, set for the Parish Center for the Arts in Westford, Oct. 1-14. The rest of the works will be landscape and nature paintings.

People have responded to the tragedy in various ways, and language has failed many, including Puiatti. Some fly flags. Some give blood. Or money. The paintings give Puiatti’s feelings of loss and grief concrete form.

On Sept. 11, she awoke from a restless night – the nightmare she hadn’t had for a decade returned – she was running around looking for her family after some sort of disaster.

“I was pretty raw when I woke up. It was if I’d already been knocked down when it happened.”

Her husband, Bart Louwagie, called to tell her to turn on the news – a plane had hit one of the Trade Center towers. Then came another. Then another in Washington and a fourth in Pennsylvania.

“I was scared, shocked, afraid, and I didn’t want to be alone,” she says.

You have to see this, said her husband. She didn’t want to. She knew the city too well. She was born there. She studied at the Arts Students League on 57th Street, then the School of Visual Arts on 23rd. She had lived on 53rd, 84th, 23rd and 22nd. She recalls seeing the towers built in the early ‘70s.

During her 25 years as a commercial artist and graphic designer, she worked the city often. She loved its buzz, its volume and color.

She missed it while living in Europe and while studying at an art school in Belgium.

But only in the last few years, and since she, Louwagie and the boys moved to Chelmsford, had she taken up her own painting.

“Usually, I’m inspired by joy and beauty,” she says. I almost couldn’t bear it. The day it happened I was completely numb. Like many people, I couldn’t sleep. I was up at 4:30 and came out here and started.”

She needed “to put out the energy, to do something. I needed to feel as though I could do something for those people.”

Four hours later, Sorrow was finished and Puiatti was “exhausted.”

She woke the following day to do Anger, and Hope and Fear were completed on Friday, the 14th.

There are stars and stripes in a couple of the paintings, but the American flag never looks complete. In Anger, she sees a woman giving birth. In Sorrow, red lines represent people jumping to their deaths from the towers.

While Puiatti insists her abstracts take much of their form unintentionally (“I just paint, just follow my instincts”), she did try to help. While working on Sorrow, she learned people were trapped in the Trade Center towers basement. So she paintied lines to make the structure “more stable.” Even after it collapsed, she painted a thread across “to hold it together.”

“But I felt so powerless,” she says.

Though the third painting is called Hope, she sees less of that in the work since she did it. In Fear, Puiatti thought the white she painted could be doves in flight, but now she sees the outline of “the face of a demon.”

There was red and black. It was time to stop.

She didn’t pick up a brush for another five days.

She is working now on a two part work called reflections; soft, green and full of nature’s light.

Once again, there is beauty and calm in her work.

Behind her, pinned to a bulletin board, are impressions of New York City by her two sons, following a trip to the Big Apple over the summer. Erik, 5, has rendered the Empire State Building. Lukas, 7, included the World Trade Center towers.

Puiatti is glad they saw the twoers.

“It’s strange to mourn a building, isn’t it?”

Maybe not.

David Perry’s e-mail address is dperry@lowellsun.com. This article is re-printed with his permission and all rights are reserved by the author.