On the drawing board – what I’m working on now
As I age, and gravity presses down on my spine with ever greater intensity, the quest to reconcile beauty with pathology grows more challenging. As my spinal nerves branch away and exit from the canal, what pathways do they follow? Is this another example of the body’s creativity, as it strives to maintain balance?
My most recent work investigates these questions
- in the Consciousness of the body gallery, where a new MRI became my anatomical reference for explorations of my spinal cord and nerves, seen in the context of the figure
- in the Inner space gallery, where neural networks are reflected in the crystalline webs of the floating colors
… and I continue to explore them in work that’s currently in process on my drawing board. I’ll keep adding new work to the galleries, with links, and notes from my artist’s journal, on this page.
Artist’s journal, October 2020
What I’m thinking about most right now (grateful to be engaged in making art, amid the isolation of the pandemic) is the sense of touch.
… the sense of touch is everything, our skin in contact everywhere, my every nerve ending vibrating … the eyes practically glaze over, with the focus on one close-up detail surrounded by light and shadow, and memories of color from the inner eye.
I wrote that in an art-making journal many years ago. Now, as I return to images of the figure that I first drew back then, memories of my body’s feelings in that moment are overlaid with the feelings of now – informed by all I’ve come to know, all the visualizing and learning and looking and living in this body.
When I draw my nerves, I’m visualizing the electric signals pulsing through them, back and forth between brain and body: signals of touch, of texture, of movement and spatial awareness, of pleasure and pain.
How to create beauty when the reality is so … harsh? damaged? un-beautiful? I see on my new MRI how impaired my spinal canal is, and imagine the impact that damage or deformity has had on my spinal cord itself – the painfulness of the process by which the damage occurred and the impact it’s had on me, as I move through the world. But I also see the damage, like other manifestations of aging, as the evidence of life lived and creative efforts made. I want to make it as graceful and beautiful as possible, while telling the truth about difficulty and pain.
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