Kickin' Down the Doors

Yesterday I drew the picture which now is at the top of the page here on my blog ...I used actual art supplies to do it, rather than working on the Cyber Tablet I have.  Nothing really beats a beautiful lead holder and getting your fingers shiny black from graphite.  The tablet has one major flaw...there is no tool that imitates your fingers getting in there to smoosh around.  With my fingers I can achieve a subtlety that no brush or blender can attain.  And when I'm working in cyber "paint" there are SO many times my fingers just ITCH to get in there an work the paint.  I guess I never really got out of kindergarten...I still like to fingerpaint too much.

My biggest obstacle right now...besides having hands that look like this :

is my paucity of ideas.  Whatever happened to the person who had so many projects and ideas filling her head that she would always have at least ten projects going simultaneously because the excitement and anticipation was so intense that she just couldn't wait for the current one to be finished before plunging into another?  I know it is a combination of this disease and of the medications which have effectively subdued, not only my crazier impulses....but every creative spark I possessed.  And they have smoothed out the mania/despair flux which was so conducive to creativity.  Yes, depression sucks.  But there is nothing like it for prompting poetry.  (at least that is true in the mild to middling stages of it.  Once you enter the "dead zone" there ain't NOTHIN' being produced.) 

What I wouldn't give to be twenty and cross-legged on the dorm bed in a room filled with other
art majors in a creative conjoining of ideas.  Where people shouted out idea after idea and others took the ideas and built on them and ran with them.  These sessions went late into the early morning hours fueled by caffeine and passion.  Or to be alone in said dorm room, cross-legged still on the floor, biting tongue between my teeth in concentration as I worked to get the project just so.

What I wouldn't give to toss my art bin and pads into the car and cross the Hudson River, climbing that  remote road where the nude model and the room full of career artists sat waiting for the first pose. 

I miss it.
Is it really gone forever?
Am I really resigned and consigned to creating with words? 

I don't even have hardly any supplies left.  Some I gave away.  Some my daughter absconded with...and some just vanished.  I know I should gather my tools together and take inventory.  I don't need to have all of the bells and whistles I once did, I don't think.  If I'm not creating to have shows and sell work....then that eliminates a lot of the materials and supplies one needs.  There are so many new advances in supplies...especially in the multimedia dept where scrapbooking, stamping and multimedia fine art converge.  I don't have the money to really  explore those frontiers....but there is nothing stopping me from making use of the small potatoes I do have.  I really should invest some effort into learning photoshop...and I really need to get the watercolor pro version of ArtRage to accompany my Cyber Tablet. 

But meanwhile....It is enough that I can grip a stick of graphite and make a picture that is identifiable...even if it is coarse and rough compared to my prior technique.   Renoir suffered with severe RA and he used to tie paint brushes to his gnarled hands and continued to paint until a very old age.  The whole water lily series was completed in such a manner.  The enormous size of it was necessitated by the coarse strokes he had to work with due to his lack of dexterity.  Where there is a will there must be a way.

I have a friend  who has suffered from RA for 45 years (she had it as a  young child)...and she has a saying on her signature online. "Never Quit.  When a new door closes, I simply kick down a wall."

I love that.