Why I Create

Once I was a visual communication professor living a successful life filled with travel, ongoing creative projects, family, friends and colleagues from around the world. I had a nice house with a studio and two spoiled Yorkies. Then, one day, a brain aneurysm changed my life in an instant. My stroke was on the left side of my brain near the language center. I couldn’t speak, read and I couldn’t do things kinesthetically or physically like I once did. I had a few subtle deficits with my eyesight, my attention span wasn’t like it was, and I had the obvious weakness (hemiparesis) on my right side making mobility difficult. It was a horrible shock. I lost my career, some of my friends and colleagues, and my Yorkies went to live with someone else. However, I had much needed respite from once chaotic, overachieving life. I had nothing to but get better, to try and regain as much of my self as I could. One of the benefits of starting over was the ability to discard all of things that weren’t working. I replaced an inflated ego with determination. I needed to simplify. Literally, put one foot in front the other.

After many years of hard work I can now speak, read with difficulty, and write although I still struggle with aphasia and dysgraphia. Through physical therapy and daily workouts, the physical strength on my right side has gotten strong enough so that I can walk short distances with a cane but my dominant right hand and arm has never improved. As a right-handed designer and artist, I wasn’t the least bit ambidextrous. For a years I struggled to my left hand to do simple things like buttering bread. Wearing mascara was a disaster. And, it would years before I could draw or paint.

Gradually my left hand learned what to do. When I tried to control or force my pen or brush strokes, the results looked horrible. I had to quiet my judgmental inner dialogue and just breathe. Creativity nourished the self that was beleaguered and constrained by my disability and life circumstance. I needed creative time in my studio to heal. Art was as vital in my recovery as physical, speech, and emotional therapy.

Drawing has always been meditative for me. I use cartoons or caricature to express what I see, hear, and feel about what is going on in the world. Its simple visual style is shorthand for often complicated stories. Cartoons have always been part of my personal visual journals. I didn’t often share them. But lately, as my drawing has improved, and the daily drip, drip, drip of the current political climate has gotten more grim and frightening, I feel the need to share. As part of the disability community, I know that I am not alone in worrying about the impacts of the cuts to essential services, social security, medicare and healthcare. It’s impossible to keep up. As my lifelines disappear I feel vulnerable. I feel scared.

This series of cartoons is my visual interpretation of my own anxiety and vulnerability.  As luck would have it, the daily news brings an abundance of material. Drawing these cartoons is an escape valve for me. It is my way of taking some of my power back.