Synesthesia and Creativity

Back around 1970 - so junior year at Kalamazoo College - I was assigned the book Expanded Cinema by Gene Youngblood which Wikipedia says "was the first book to consider video as an art form." I'm a little leery of "firsts" and "uniquelys" and other such absolute claims, but it is a very cool book.  I think it is in a box back in Raleigh, which means it survived nine or ten “bookshelf purges” in which I would clear out books I deemed “no longer important.”  I would stack them out side my office door with a sign reading “Help Yourself.”  I think Expanded Cinema made the cuts so many times because it has an excellent introduction by Buckminster Fuller, but even more so because it introduced me to the whole notion of synesthesia.

I think of synesthesia as a neurological railroad roundhouse, sort of like in Thomas the Tank Engine, where the trains get shuffled onto the proper track. To greatly simplify, vibrations come into the ear, strike the ear drum and then make their way to the roundhouse - AKA the brain - which shuffles those impulses onto the right track and we hear music. The eyes do the same with visual data, nose to smell, skin to feel, etc. Well, people with synesthesia - synesthetes - have some unusual cross overs in the road house. For some synesthetes the letters blue come into the eyes black but the brain sees blue. Some synesthetes smell coffee and see specific images.  Sounds can have shapes and colors. It is a fascinating condition, I certainly hesitate to call it a disability.  Especially after watching a couple of recent episodes on Curiosity Stream.

The series is called “Secrets of the Brain” and it is hosted by Dr. Jack Lewis who is out to “learn everything there is to know about the brain!” Well, you know how I feel about absolutes, but he looks pretty young - maybe early thirties - so we’ll cut him a little slack. Especially since since the last two episodes, on synesthesia and creativity are aimed at combining those two of my personal favorite curiosities.

I have already talked about synesthesia, but another episode dealt with creativity. And, as a standard device in the series, Dr. Jack likes to seek out folks whose neurological conditions are the result of other than normal development. In this episode Dr. Lewis encounters a man who, as the result of a stroke develops “sudden creative out put.” Previously the gentleman had no interest in the arts, but post stroke becomes obsessed with the fine arts - painting in particular. He leaves his old life and becomes a fine artist, producing some admirable works, but is unable to explain where the ideas for his works come from.

OK, let’s stop messing around with background information and get to the important part: me. I have been doodling for as long as I was forced to sit in a classroom with nothing but a piece of paper - or to tell the truth, the border of a textbook - and a marker of some type to entertain me. There was a brief, very brief, time when I worried if drawing in a hymnal was a sin. But when I began to help my Catholic buddy make up sins for confession, the whole question became moot. Truth was I just doodled because it was fun and calming. No doubt an argument for putting me somewhere on “the autism spectrum” there, but secretly I’m thinking most creative people are.

Anyhow my drawing, and PPP images are a bit strange, but I am now leaning towards the notion that - having no other rational explanation for them - I have decided that they are a combination of synesthesia and the kind of creativity Dr. Lewis is playing with in his Curiosity Stream series. So I’m going to take you through one image from a  “synestcreative” perspective.  I call it “The Rose,” but in truth it is a cabbage.

As I have mentioned before I have fallen victim to the “billions and billions” of images trap of digital photography. I have more images than makes any kind of sense, but my experience of reviewing them is different from the social hell of sitting in someone’s living room watching the slides of their most recent vacation to Disneyland. If you are too young to remember “slides” go light a candle or make a donation to some deserving charity.

Rather than beginning to drool and slide out of my seat, when I watch my collected images they shift shape - like digital shape shifters.  Like this first image - when viewed statically and knowing it is from a garden show it becomes pretty obvious that it is a red cabbage.

But as I concentrate of the image more intensely its "cabbageness" gets a little slippery, and in my mind it becomes much more like a rose. And having just finished working on the sunflower image “Beyond Yellow,”  RoseCabbage begins to suggest that pieces of it should be removed. And I say "RoseCabbage suggests" because I really am not aware of participating in the selection.  That is not to say that it works like a Ouija board with the image taking control of my hand and moving it around.  Rather I just sort of stare at the image and eventually something feels right. So I draw dark lines around the part of the image to be removed, and blank them out. Like this:

Then RoseCabbage and I work together to decide what designs should go in each of the blanks. And I put the designs in like this:

The next step is adding color to the designs, and RoseCabbage and I will work on that soon. Selecting colors that feel right from this collection. I again say RoseCabbage and I because it is a group effort. A lot of sitting and staring before I pick up a marker.  That step takes a long, long time. And I will share the final result with you when it is done. 

The point is that I think the process by which my drawings come to be is really a combination of three neurological processes, and it would be an error to think of them as separate, or to try to cleanly unwind them.  The initial selection of the primary image is dominated by, but not totally dependent on sights I have seen or images I already possess. I mentioned in the previous post that I have a fairly clear picture in my head of what "home" should look like, yet have no such image in my collection. So it is clear that I will be looking about me for a possible stand in. So creativity plays a large role here. Once I have decided on the primary image the rest of the creative process seems to blend, at least synesthesia with perhaps a touch of healthy autism. 

No doubt some grad student - in art, psychology, or psychiatry - is out there hammering away on a dissertation that will explain all this. But, until then, I think I can be satisfied to just enjoy myself.

Homelessness

Being well aware of the millions of people around the world without a roof over their heads or even walls to support a roof, for whom both water and food are  precarious necessities, for whom vaccines are either rumors or myths, not just for Covid-19, but for measles, mumps, and the other diseases creeping back into the 21st century under attack by privileged 1st world anti-vaxxers; yes, I have some, admittedly second-hand, knowledge of what it actually means to be homeless. Yet, while living in a solid, well-insulated structure with central heating, air-conditioning, indoor plumbing, and electrical outlets per code, every 6 feet along each wall, and a dependable internet connection, I still claim to be “homeless.”

Now wait a minute. Let me explain. Mine is a completely different kind of "homelessness," one that has nothing to do, thank god, with a lack of those creature comforts listed above. Rather it has to do with a more ephemeral feeling of “being at home,” of “belonging,” of “well being.” I have a colleague who moved from the mountains of Salt Lake City, Utah to Raleigh, North Carolina, a city perched equidistant between the mountains and the ocean on the east coast. Upon arriving here, after trekking across the continent, “Never,” she claimed, “have I felt more at home.” I envy her, for never have I felt that sense of being at home.

I think it is my mother’s fault. Her’s and her books. For me, being “at home” has almost nothing to do with where I currently reside. Were “home” to be defined by place of residence, I actually have lived in several places long enough for them to take on the quality of “homeness.” I was born in Springfield, Ohio and lived there - with the exception of two years spent in Vienna, Austria - until I got married in 1969. So what, 20 years? Then there was a span of almost 40 years in Raleigh, N.C., teaching at NC State. It was an enjoyable tenure for the most part, but never, to quote John Denver, “Coming home to a place he’d never been before.” And this is where blaming my mother comes in. She was, more than my father, the one who established “reading” as the activity that trumped all others.

Done your homework? I’m reading. OK.

Cleaned up your room? I’m reading. OK.

Coming to dinner? Let me finish this chapter. OK.

And, of course, you could bring your book to the dinner table, where everyone was reading.

The problem was, and is, that the worlds, the “homes,” created in our books were inevitably more wonderful, more engaging, more exciting than the physical homes, the constructed towns, the bustling cities and the day-to-days lives in which we actually lived. Literature - and of course, theater - set the bar of “home” impossibly high.

Another wrinkle in my admittedly distorted notion of “home” was that it was defined more by the people and the relationships surrounding me in my books, than the structures, locales, and relationships in which I happened to be a flesh and blood participant. Again, fiction cranked the bar way beyond Olympic level. Who could really compete for Dulcinea? Perhaps I could if my name were Bond, James Bond. 

And there were those times, as I assume there are for any serious actor, author or playwright, when the line between the fiction you are creating and your “real life” becomes uncomfortably vague. Truth be told, that fuzziness was a major reason that, despite some very tempting opportunities to “do,” I chose instead to “teach.” But I digress.

None of that is to say that I have never encountered places where, as we say in the South, “I might could” choose to make my “home.”  Cabin #12 in the pines at Tower Hill Camp, in Sawyer, Michigan, was one such place. It has the additional appeal of being close to the woods where the ashes of my parents and my older brother lie scattered. However, when I last saw it a year or two ago, it appeared a touch dilapidated. Damaged perhaps during some ill-planned fit of renovation?  The garden of the Hotel Monna Lisa in Florence, Italy, also seems imminently “home-ish.” Still, I’m thinking it would probably get a bit pricey as a permanent residence, and the mosquitoes are killer after sundown. Hmmm. There must be others. Maybe they will come to me later.

So that’s what I mean when I claim to be homeless. Sites in the “real world” fall short of the “home” of my imagination. I have friends who are quite skilled at representational painting, and it is at times like this that I most envy them that talent. I can see the "home place" fairly clearly in my mind’s eye. It is on a secluded lake. Maybe another home or two are scattered around the lake, but distant and hidden by the trees. Too far to walk, but reachable by boat, kayak, or inner tube. My “home” has a boat house. Both structures are rustic. The lake is hemmed in by pines, a few hardwood’s scattered further back. It is northerly enough for snow between Thanksgiving and New Years. Strangely enough, not too far away are some excellent restaurants, shopping, etc., but not enough to attract tourists. Also strangely, there are people around me with whom I share pleasant memories. However, as is common in some of my dreams, I’m not positive just whom they are or the details of the memories we share. And then there is the fact that the real people who are precious to me in my real life would find my “perfect home” excessively bucolic for long term occupancy.  Hence, another major barrier to somehow, sometime, losing my feeling of homelessness.

As I said, this is one of those times when I wish I had some skill at realistic drawing. If I could get the place and the people in my mind down on paper I might be able to recognize my “home” and find a way to get there. Or at least I could create an image where, Denver again, I could “come home to a place I’d never been before.” Until then, I’ll take comfort in Bilbo’s assurance, “The road goes ever on and on.”

The Tech Billionaires are Grabbing The Low Hanging Fruit

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OK, so Jeff Bezos rode his rather phallic contraption 10 minutes up to “sort of” space. Sir Richard Branson flew his more Si-fi friendly looking craft earlier, but a bit lower, up into weightlessness. Elon Musk’s SpaceX machines are making these one-offs seem positively humdrum by routinely ferrying astronauts up to the International Space Station. And in addition SpaceX just sent four “citizen astronauts” on a sort of joy ride around the globe. Cool, I guess, as a pilot for a Reality TV Show “Billionaires in Space,” or something.

Forgive me if I am not terribly impressed. These efforts, from a transportation perspective, failed to raise my eyebrows, as I made my way at heart-stopping speeds - sometimes approaching 12 miles an hour - along I-85, one of America’s “super highways.” Come on guys, give me a break. From a transportation perspective Musk’s hyper loop technology is far more impressive as it, at least, moves regular folks from point A to point B far more efficiently than current systems. Of course there is the problem that that current system just moves us from from one part of LA to another. Not a big deal here in Chicagoland.

The “UFO videos” recently released by the government (see https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-military-intelligence-60-minutes-2021-08-29/ ) seem to indicate that the “My space ship is faster than your space ship” horse has already left the barn. I mean those dudes or dudettes or gender free space entities seem to be strolling around in speeds measured in many multiples of light years. Eat your heart out NASCAR. Which makes me think that rather than messing around with what seem to be sort of "Kitty Hawk" efforts when viewed in the big "transportation" picture, we ought to be putting serious thought and serious research funding into Captain Kirk’s prophetic command: “Beam me up Scotty!”

Yeah. Teleportation. Perhaps quantum entanglement might be a more fertile research field to plow than nuclear fusion or giant solar sails, at least when it comes to space travel. Although, the pandemic has made the idea of terrestrial teleporting across town an attractive notion. But with teleportation global holidays would be back again! Teleporting to Florence or Buenos Aires would beat the heck out of airports!

I know it sounds a bit like Asimov sci-fi stuff. But let me relate a quick family story. When my father received his Ph.D in sociology from the University of Chicago back in - I believe it was 1945. I’d have to look in the lining of his academic gown which I wore to every commence until my own retirement last year. The date is on a label in there somewhere. Anyhow somehow Grandmother Schrag was persuaded to travel from the tiny farming community of Freeman, South Dakota, to the wicked city of Chicago to witness her son’s big day. Dad, wanting to show her the sights took her to an upscale department store, maybe Carson Pirie Scott & Company, maybe Marshall Fields, not sure which.  Wherever, things were going along nicely until Dad led her to the escalator to show her even more wonders on the second floor. I do not know if the words “instrument of the devil” ever escaped the lips of that devote Mennonite matron, but the gist of the matter was clear. "Stairs did not move," and nothing in this fancy, frilly city could induce her to set foot on them.

The point is that we tend to associate certain classes of technology to meet specific needs. Writing moved from sticks in clay, to carving in stone, to marks on bamboo and papyrus, ink on hides, rag paper, to typewriters, printers, and now these screens. Transportation moved from riding on critters to the critters hauling various evolutions of wheels that moved people from place to place, eventually assisting with over land and water and through the air, and now into space. The problem is that each evolution seems to put blinders on the path forward. The question gets to be “How do we improve on that recent innovation? How do I build a better wheeled vehicle? To now, how do I build a better rocket-propelled space ship? How do I pick people up in one place and deliver them to another, like a load of potatoes? And research dollars and creative, innovative energy moves down that predetermined, blinder-obscured path. And the billionaires hustle down that path.

Hauling potatoes or people from point A to point B is the easy path. That’s transportation. Making a potato vanish from point A and the reappear at point B hundreds of miles or light years away - now that is impressive, that is teleportation. Difficult? OMG!! That’s transportation evolution on steroids! Beyond the transition from wooden ladders to moving stairs, from paths in the forest to moving walkways in the airport! Teleportation says no more low hanging fruit that dangle in front of the blinders on the straight and narrow part before us. It means, at least, taking off the blinders and considering the radical new questions we need to address even before we can consider the best route to the answers.

So beam us up Scotty, to infinity and beyond!  Etc,. etc., etc.

Foolish Faux Filing

 Having just finished a few hours scanning through a few decades of photos stored on my external hard drive, It is probably a good time to share this post that I drafted late one night last week. . . , or last month, or last year. Or some other time.

I suppose my first clear recollection of this lifelong character flaw was in 7th grade. I came home after school one day, picked up a blank reporters notebook and a ballpoint pen.  Then I took a stack of 33 lps of classical music and put them on the turntable, hit start and began to write. Free verse, blank verse, some kind of verse. And I wrote until the music stopped or I ran out of paper - I forget which. Point is I sort of lost track of the notebook. I have stumbled across it a few times in the last 50 or 60 years. Amazed each time that I had it in my hands again. And then promptly mislaid it again.

It is a strange flaw that, if I had a shrink, I would certainly bring to his or her attention. It has grown more pronounced as the world has become more purely digital.  A bit of Sharon  Vaughn’s classic country song, My Heroes Have Always Been Cowboys goes like this:

“Pickin' up hookers instead of my pen,

I let the words of my youth fade away.” 

Well, hookers have never been part of my existence, but I can certainly relate to the fear of losing “the words of my youth” or the words of my middle age, or the words of my golden years, or any of my words. It’s not that my words are all worth enshrining on vellum in blue or blue-black ink, as Miss Manners would instruct us for important correspondence, but occasionally there is some good stuff there that I would like to keep.

So I have become a digital hyper-saver. I have a DropBox account - maybe two  and I compose and save these Wall posts in Evernote, as well as saving copies in a separate file, before publishing them through Blogger where they are also saved.  And then there is my stand-alone 8TB hard drive on which I save, not only back-ups of those files, but every time I get a new computer I copy the entire hard drive onto my stand alone drive. I think I have copies of about 5 different hard drives stashed there. And we aren’t taking just Wall files, we are talking correspondence, art, music, poetry, research papers, books, etc. If I created it and it exists in digital form, it is on that drive. And as I mentioned at the very beginning of this post I sometimes get lost in there.

I know, doc, that isn’t normal, and I am working on it. But that isn’t the worst part. You see, I’m not really sure where on all those devices - online or stand alone - where any of that stuff is, or even what all is there. Sometimes when I am bored I will click over to the hard drive and browse around. [See above.] The other day I came across copies of a mini-website I had made dealing with the relationship between sculpture and quantum entanglement. OK, after I got there I remembered having done that for a class lecture, and could sort of recall why I thought it made sense. But had you asked me a priori if I had I created such a site, and where it was, my response would have been a more earthy version of “Surely you jest.”

“So,” you ask, “are you getting any better?”

“That all depends on what you mean by better,” I reply.

“I mean this need to retain everything, yet seemingly losing track of where particular pieces of ‘everything’ may be.” You clarify.

“Ah, yes. I have noticed that. And I haven’t even mentioned those writings that I wish to retain, but wish to keep totally private, but don’t know where to keep them. I mean if I could stumble across them, couldn't the CIA? The Proud Boys? So, no, not really better.” I admit.

“And what writings are those?” You ask.

“I’d really rather not go into that,” I reply.

You push a little further, “Can you give me an example of these things you write that you wish to retain, but are ambivalent about sharing?”

“Well, there is seemingly this post,” I mutter.

“What about it” you insist.

“I just sort of found it while looking for something else, and I don’t think I every posted it. There is nothing with this title on the Wall. But here it is on my screen.”

“How else could you find out if you posted it.”

“I suppose I could ask my sister. She keeps all of these posts.”

“That’s very interesting. But I see our time is up. Perhaps we can go into this further in our next session.”

“So do you want to keep our notes from today? Or should I?"

Schrag Wall: PPP Beyond Yellow

 As I read Dan's Elegy for Patti "Yellow," [ see https://schragwall.blogspot.com/2021/09/read-it-forward.html] I naturally fell to thinking about yellow as a color. And the image of a sunflower that I had taken back in Raleigh. And the notion that in a sunset all kinds of colors can mingle with yellow.  This is what resulted:

Read it Forward

Hi there -

As you have no doubt noticed, I read a lot. That said, I take a backseat to very few similarly addicted readers. First among whom is most likely my big sister. Yet, she also manages to watch every broadcast sports event that touches - no matter how tangentially - the life of any Northwestern athlete who attended NU during the 35 or so years when she was academic advisor to that cadre. And yet she reads and reads and reads. I am firmly, if somewhat eerily convinced, that if she ever sleeps she may do so in a coffin 🦇 But I digress.

The point is that any of us who read to excess will often come across a phrase or sentence, that makes you sit back and say “Whoa! That is really extraordinary! I wish I had written that!”  In that situation I will sometimes write the author and say something like: You know on page 217 where so and so remarks to that other character . . . . . " Well, whoa that is really extraordinary! I wish I had written that!” Sometimes they write back and we chat a bit. Sometimes they don’t. It is a neat experience. 

It is even more special when the praiseworthy piece has been penned by someone precious to you. I have mentioned my friend Dan several times here on the Wall. We were born 7 days apart - I'm older 🙂 - on two sides of the duplex our families shared while our fathers were young professors at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio. I'm not sure how he came to be the better writer. Probably that Ph.D in English at Carolina. Anyhow, we were raised more as siblings than as friends and remain somewhat psychically joined at the hip. Sadly, Dan’s first wife died of pancreatic cancer a number of years ago. An elegy he rote for her - I suspect those many years in the making - was recently published by a Brit publication called Fortnightly Review.  The entire piece is one of those “Whoa! I wish I had written that!”  pieces, except for the fact that I am glad both my spouses are alive.

Anyhow, Fortnightly Review, like many online pubs will shuffle pieces to “back pages” depending on how many hits they generate. I would strongly suggest you click on over to it - if not for a chance at reading some awesome writing, then to keep the memory of this awesome woman front and center for a little while longer.

Here is the link:

Http://fortnightlyreview.co.uk./2021/07/Coyle-yellow/

Cheers

Strange Dreams

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It is probably because I am immersed in a reread of the Harry Potter books that I find myself thinking about the strange places to which dreams can take us. If you have read the series, perhaps many times, maybe alone or with your kids, you may recall the “pensieve.” This was a basin of sorts, usually stored in Dumbledore's closet, that could transport you into other times and places - into the memories of events. Sometimes your own, sometimes those stored in the minds of others. Anyhow, I have been drifting around in some hi-def dreams lately - amazing clarity. But unfortunately the increased resolution has done nothing to increase my ability to remember the damn things. Sometimes flashes do occur post dream: “Hey! That might have been so-and-so!” But not much certainty.

Still they have the feeling of being “real.” Sparkling. Intense. Perhaps those glittering little bits of alternate realities have greater appeal these days when the current “real world” seems awash in discord. So I find myself wandering around again considering the fascinating twists and turns of quantum mechanics. You see I do sincerely believe that the quantum mechanics notion of “many worlds” is on to something. Briefly, the quantum mechanics notion of many worlds asserts that every potential version of reality unfolds simultaneously in parallel universes. I know, I know - seems crazy, but not really any more bizarre than the end states proposed by any number of “traditional belief systems” that require an ever-expanding universe that can accommodate every soul who ever lived in a sort of “now we can all be friends,” existence, or an exclusive “only my people get in” gated-community approach to an afterlife. Neither of those worldviews get any screen time in my dreams or memories. But the idea of the quantum mechanics notion of many worlds seems an interesting way of approaching those dozing or dreaming altered states of consciousness in which I sometimes find myself.

It is interesting to consider all the billions and billions of worlds spiraling out in an infinite universe, yet I am really only interested in those that concern me. I mean what do I actually care about the billions of other versions of existence out there starring other players, right? But I am incredibly curious about all my “roads not taken” - those significant choices at moments in my life where I chose to do A, but could have just as easily done B, C, D, etc,.  So I wonder if my dreams, or the “editing” thereof that seems to intrude on my memories are some sort of psychic “wormholes” that let me peek down those roads not taken. What if I, as the survey I took in 5th grade said I should, became a forest ranger? Had married other than I did? How about that girl back in 1965 who also wanted to adopt “Jimmy” one of my “itsy-bittsy-skitsies” from the permanent treatment center in Northern California where we both worked? She was nice. Many worlds says I really did make all those choices and the various versions of my self is living those lives. And perhaps those other selves are peeking into mine through their dreams, as curious about the life I am living as I am about theirs.

So I wonder if there is any truth in that quantum possibility of viewing my other lives through my dreams? Is there any way to enhance or extend the experience? Anyway to remember the dreams? Anything to be learned from them? Anything that lets me slide down the many world’s wormholes that, however, avoids damaging or losing any of my remaining brain cells?

Enough. I must again to sleep. Perchance to dream.

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Playing with Pollock and Rothko

 I have always held that there are two rather huge divisions in the general field of art - at least from the artist’s point of view. There are those who create for themselves - driven by an inner need to create, to give form to personal urges and perceptions. Then there are those who create to meet the perceptions of what another - an audience - wants or needs. The first is a kind of “art as personal therapy” perspective, which can, as in the Bob Ross school, extend to others - but remains primarily “of the self,” a “not for profit” slice of the art world - again with Ross as an almost accidental exception. Even those who hang out their shingle as “art therapists” generate revenue not from the art created, but, hopefully, from the increased well-being of their clients.

The interesting division occurs when you try to distinguish between “inner need” artists, and artists who make a career from meeting the needs of clients. Obviously “commercial artists” live in the “for profit” world - creating the cute and cuddly or the sleek and sexy images designed to entice us to buy the physical products represented by the images they create. But, to stretch the notion a bit, what about Michaelanglo? Nobody is going to compare the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel with the “toucan artwork” on a box of Fruit Loops. Nobody except perhaps Michaelanglo himself, who always self-identified as a sculptor, not a painter.  Painting the chapel ceiling was the “commercial arrangement” Michaelanglo reached with Pope Sixtus IV to buy his freedom to do the sculpture that addressed Michaelanglo’s inner needs as reflected in The David and The Pieta.

Which sort of brings me around to the works of Pollock and Rothko, two artists whose works I have a tendency to belittle. Mia culpa. I now realize that I have been making the same mistake that many scholars and art critics have made about the works of these two men. They are not commercial artists. They are inner driven. Rothko would eventually turn down lucrative commissions as being at odds with the pure intentions of his works. Pollock might well have gone unknown commercially except for the efforts of his wife, and fellow artist, Lee Krasner and the art world’s dominant king maker of the time, Peggy Guggenheim. Both women felt there was something worth saving in the works of this alcoholic “bad boy.”

What I have just now stumbled across is the realization that I have been looking at Pollock and Rothko as commercial artists, though more toward the Sistine chapel than the Fruit Loops end of the spectrum. But their commercial success in the art world seems to have occurred almost by accident, certainly in Pollock’s case by the efforts of Krasner and Guggenheim. And in Rothko’s by catching the eye of a cluster of avant garde critics. I think I will now better understand them as “inner driven” artists. And there is an inner driven reason for this shift in my own perception. The last image I shared with you - Sisters - was a real pain in the - well, choose the place you would least prefer to encounter pain. Point is, the product of the image took me deep into the foibles of digital technology and far from the far more appealing realm of “drawing.” It was personally, and creatively exhausting.

And with the clarity that that the rear view mirror often provides, that exhaustion may have contributed to the fierce head cold that wiped me out for a few days. I confronted said cold with my father’s preferred remedy: “When you feel poorly go to bed and sleep until you feel better.” I know, that perspective will never make it to JAMA, but the guy did live to be 100!  Anyhow, I am back, not 100 percent, but somewhere north of 85.

But “pre-cold,” I started a new “drawing,” one far afield from an image that had to look “right,” or even capture the feeling of a related, or “seed” photo, as in the PPP images.  I created the “healing drawing” by taking a large, 17 x 14, sheet of drawing paper and a couple of dark markers and letting the markers just wander over the paper until I had a nice, sort of balanced, scribble. Then I just let my other color markers decide what colors should go where. I got about 30% of the page close to what I considered “done” when the cold arrived and I went to bed.  I have now completed the “healing drawing” which accompanies this post. Yet, It was while playing - literally - with that drawing that I came to the foregoing thoughts on Pollock and Rothko.  They were not “fine artists” as we usually think of folks who works grace the halls of the “musey rooms.” They were seeking some sort of inner clarity with their work. And if we ask “How are you doing with that?” We get an alcoholic and a suicide. 

But we also find Bob Ross in this category of artists who sort of found fame by accident, and whose struggles with life led him to a conscious effort to, professionally, share the joy of painting with anyone interested to listen in and watch, and personally to never raise his voice to others.  A much better outcome. And one that encourages us to pursue our own drawings for the joy of it, and when any part of it leads anywhere else, we need to step back and hit the restart button.

So here my restart button - again my apologies for the poor image quality, but to fight for better quality here in blogger drags me away from drawing and back to digital image processing which is not my objective here. Remember the original is 17x14 😁