How my drawings came to be

The drawings in this show arise from my experience of solitude living on Thetis Island, and the particular way my house sat in the bedrock. I had the visual advantage of floor-to-ceiling widows front and back, so that day and night, I felt congruent with the outdoors.

This developed my perceptual capabilities and basic awareness. I felt a fundamental identity between myself and the trees, the water, moss, lichen and all the birds that lived there, too. Moment-to-moment I returned to the natural world from what ever task or thought had taken me away. It was always there, the great outdoors, ever changing in its patterns. I developed skillful means of deep concentration. And over time, moments of a totally unaffected appreciation of what I was seeing. The “out there” was really “there.”

Think of a typical soft grey coast day after a wind and rainstorm. The water is flat, stillness is palpable—dreamy—you can enter into that stillness, and then you see the lichen on the trunks of fir trees almost growing before your very eyes. The moss is plumped up. Birds are jubilant. There is so much movement in that stillness. There is never nothing. Eternity is glimpsed.

In his wondrous tome, Zen and the Brain, James H. Austin speculates that latent within each human brain are the innate capacities to comprehend and integrate the ground of all energies—the integrating principle of the universe. I certainly experienced moments of feeling that this was so. Mostly fleeting, but these moments accumulate. I felt it all over,body and brain. Bodymind.

Accumulation of moments, accumulation of marks on paper. Thedrawings are an act of translation. A visual way to put to paper my experience of being there. Mark by mark, layer by layer, chance by chance. The tension of stillness and movement. The chance to return to the present. Over and over again. I wasn’t drawing what I was looking at, I was drawing how I was looking.

The first drawing in this series was made in the lull of a five-day power outage crisis in January 2005, after a major windstorm brought Thetis Island to a standstill. Between drafts of writing my novel, From This Distance, I had prepped an image I had found in my woodshed one morning after I slammed an axe into a wedge of fir. On the inside of bark, as it fell to the ground, I instantly saw that insects had laboriously burrowed and gnawed through the bark —leaving beautiful, intricate labyrinths.

I dried the bark by the wood stove. Cleaned out the passages with a wood carving tool. Made a rubbing on velum. Enlarged the velum. Put it away in a drawer for a rainy day…or as it turned out, snowy day. I couldn’t write during that crisis, so I drew simply with graphite (the oldest substance on the planet) on velum. I drew like the insects, like the lichen, like the moss.

And this, like the pattern I found in the bark, became my pattern. When I couldn’t write, I drew. One centimetre at a time, one inch at a time. Pencil on paper was something my nervous system could handle after Trigeminal/Glossopharyngeal neuralgia struck and I was set on a critical path.

Dr. Fernando Cervero, MD PhD DsC, says in his TED Talk and book Understanding Pain: “If you have liver disease you don’t stop being yourself. But if you have something wrong with your brain you cease to be yourself.”

My struggle was more than learning to live with daily pain—it is 7 to 9.5 on the pain scale —it was also about learning to be this new self while maintaining as much of my old self as possible.

A few things happened along this new path. As the drawings became more varied and developed, my drawing mark changed and evolved. An old curiosity about the brain developed into a new obsession about what the cranial nerves were and how they worked and how they could become diseased. It’s so odd to think that for the first fifty-five years of my life I only knew about the nerves of the body and the spinal cord. I never thought to wonder what made everything move and feel above the neck! (Do you?)

I didn’t know how neurons or synapses worked, what action potentials are, or the function of the white matter: glial cells. Not that I really know now, but I have an idea of the complexity. (And frankly, as my neurosurgeon said one day after one of my more refined questions, nobody really knows how the brain works.) After a while, I realized that some of my drawing patterns had morphed into structures that look like diagrams or images of these processes. But I was drawing these processes before I came across the images. I was open and feeling my way into the pain. I was trying to listen to what my body was trying to tell me, even before the doctors knew themselves.

Drawing became not only just an act of translation, but a means of coping with my medical challenges. More and more, the place I loved became a place that was working against me. I knew, even before the surgery, that my time on Thetis needed to come to an end. It was a very bittersweet realization.  Now, I have emerged from my solitude and am currently finding my place in the art world again.