Parkinson's: Getting Back Your Groove
Corrine suggested to me to write about my starting to do
art again. I haven't done much visual art in a long while. Why?
First I was too tired to and after that, my focus has been on
Parkinson's. I have written this blog, created a few poems and done some clown
workshops. After I started thinking
about doing the Parkinson's Puzzle Hunt, I have painted rocks for some of the
treasure and worked on coming up with a logo for the hunt.
If anyone would like to do some rock painting or collage
some rocks for the Treasure Hunt, it
would be wonderful! I have 2 huge bags
of gorgeous, smooth, river rocks. A bag of white rocks and a bag of black
ones. I can give you however many you
want to work on!
Lately, I have
been given opportunities to do art. I think that's important, for me,
having a reason to do art or being asked to do it. I have noticed that creating
visual art is on my tempo. Which is kind of slow these days. I do it when I can, for as long as I can.
(That sounds like the Jafagirl motto that Corrine always used!)
Creating visual art is also meditative.
The YS Arts Council's Members' Show is coming up this
month and I have been slowly (with joy) working on a piece for that. The theme for the show is “When Imagination
Runs Wild.” That was very tempting. I have painted Honey Bears a couple of times
before and have stock piled a box of them that I have prepainted with a white
gesso. So I got out some and went to it.
After painting about 9 faces on bears, I
found myself being drawn to 4 of them. And a story began coming together in my
head about them.
The reception for the show is Friday February 17th
6-9pm. And I have heard tell that there might be a pop up open mic. So bring a poem or a song or a short essay or
a story to tell!
At the same time, I got an e mail from a friend, “Do you
want to be part of an Art Book.?”
“What do you mean by an Art Book?” I asked.
“It is a sketch book,
that is going to, slowly, over a year, be filled with art by 12
people.” We each purchase a sketch
book. We create art, in any medium, on
the front and back cover and the inside of the front and back covers. On the 15th of this month, we will
pass our sketch book on to another person. All year long, every month we will
get a different sketch book from one of the artists, we create a 2 page spread
of art and then pass it on, for another
person to work on. At the end of
the year, our original one comes back to us.
It will be filled with the art of all 12 people.
I said “Sure, it sounds like fun!”
So I can still do art.
But what else has changed since I got my diagnosis of Parkinson's? I am not seeing well (Is it PD or Aging? Who
knows.) which means I spend a lot of time frustrated by tiny lines done in ink
or paint and cutting paper or fabric or stitching is difficult. But I can still
do it. It just takes longer and I have a lot of redo's.
I was sent a great article from Carla (Thank you Carla)
about Henri Matisse. When the French painter was 71, he had extremely risky
surgery done for an abdominal obstruction and a potentially cancerous tumor in
his colon. “It worked, and gave him 13
more years of life.”
“But after the surgery his mobility was severely
restricted, and he spent a lot of time in bed.
He suffered from fevers, exhaustion, and the effects of the medicines he
was given.” Painting like he had done it before, felt impossible.
He didn't give up. “Matisse transformed himself by
transforming his work and turning to collage.
With the help of assistants, he would apply paint to paper, then cut it
out and arrange the pieces into works that ranged from small to almost
monumental. He regarded them as the
culmination of his artistic career. It
is a lesson learned when we practice a radical aesthetic openness to our
bodies, to what they can do and produce as time and chance inevitably
transform us.” an essay from This Beauty:
A Philosophy of Being Alive
by Nick Riggle
What does a
radical aesthetic openness to our bodies mean?
He goes on to say-”to what they can do and produce as time and
chance inevitably transform us.”
An aesthetic openness- a beautiful freedom to believe we can
always create in other ways? It makes me
think of the differently abled painters who paint with the brushes in their mouths.
For me, I think it means- Make art any way, Create anyway. It will be different
each time. It's time to get my groove back.
What do you think it means?
Nancy & the Snark
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