Drawing Is The Thing That Saves Me. It Can Save You Too…

Last night I was having a really hard time, with old age having crept in, bringing rather startling and unexpected disabilities along on the ride, and chronic pain. It can just wear a body down. But the worst thing is the places we go in our heads, and we need to get out of our heads.

When I was a little girl I loved to draw. I liked coloring books but preferred just to create whatever wild thing was in my mind on whatever was handy. Construction paper, cardboard, whatever. I had no idea, nor did I care, what it was supposed to look like. I was not trying to be an artist — I didn’t even yet know what that was — I was just doodly-dooing about having fun. And it all went well until 2nd grade.

I liked art class because we got new crayons for the school year and I figured I could just carry on as I had with a whole group of kids. What fun! However, the teacher seemed to have a very specific goal in mind and wanted us to do things a certain way, a way that my mind just couldn’t grok. So I kept on doing what I always did, making things up, coloring them in whatever colors suited my fancy, until that awful day.

I went to Catholic school and our teacher, an older nun, who was not friendly and for some reason had never seemed to like me, walked up and down the aisles as we drew, peering over her spectacles with obvious disdain, but she didn’t say anything to anyone… until she got to me.

She grabbed my paper out of my hands and scoffed at it. “What is this?” she asked in a nasty tone of voice. I tried to explain that it was trees and clouds and birds and so on but she said, “This isn’t the way you’re supposed to draw! You’ll NEVER be an artist!” Tears welled up in my eyes and I was confused. I wasn’t trying to be an artist — I still didn’t really know what that was — I was just drawing. But it got worse. She carried my picture up in front of the class and showed it to everyone and laughing said, “Look, she calls this ART.” and with that she tore up my little drawing in front of everyone. And the whole class laughed uproariously and pointed at me and I sat burrowed down in my seat crying and never tried to draw again. I didn’t know I was “making art” and I had no desire or idea about being an artist, I just wanted to draw, and it seemed I didn’t do it right.

She explained to the class, “Clouds aren’t green and the sky isn’t orange, and the leaves on the trees aren’t pink and for heaven’s sakes the grass is surely not blue!” Everyone laughed. I was confused but I didn’t say a word. I had simply drawn what was in my mind’s eye, and I saw a fantastic, magical world all around me. It seemed that wasn’t proper or appropriate and I was so afraid, so frozen in time in that terrible moment, that I stopped drawing altogether.

All through the years the most I did was scribble or doodle in the margins of my notebooks, nothing in particular, but I didn’t dare try to draw anything. In highschool I was in awe of the girls who said they were going to be artists and they could really draw amazingly well. Further proof I could never do it.

I lived my life, went to college, got married and had 3 children, and always had some kind of creative pursuit going on, mainly writing, art simply wasn’t even in my mind. But I was mesmerized by all of the amazing things in art supply stores, even if I had no clue what to do with any of them. Through the years I doodled tiny things in my journals but I didn’t try to “draw” anything. And then one day I was 59 and something in me changed.

I didn’t dare go to a real art supply store, but I did buy some art supplies at the Dollar Store which worked just fine for me. A kid’s watercolor set, some chalk pastels, and a few other things. I bought a cheap sketchbook too and brought it home. Finally I sat trembling here at my work table and started kind of smooshing the pastels around. I liked that they were messy and I could move them about with my fingers. It felt non-threatening. It felt good, and I kept on.

Eventually I started drawing a series of “Ladies” I called “The 100 Ladies Project.” They were only heads because I didn’t know how to draw anything else and make it “look real.” That’s what I thought art was, making things look real. But I had a ball with my Ladies and when I shyly started sharing them with people I was amazed! People loved them! I always drew the lady and wrote a little story to go with her, something whimsical, or touching, or funny. Just a little story. In 5 years I had done 100’s of them and had a ball. I still wasn’t considering myself or trying to be an artist. I was just drawing. I called this one “The Perm Didn’t Work!”

All of the Ladies were cattywompus and lopsided and kind of screwbally, but I loved them and amazingly other people did too. After some long time I ventured into drawing more of the bodies using watercolors and they were just as cattywompus…

As time went along I drew a lady who was very distinct and she started having a story. That lady led to another and one day, in 2019, I started drawing Maisie and her little dog Daisy, based on my Molly and I. She’s on my website and has her own Society 6 shop, but one day it was all just too much. Maisie’s paintings were big and very detailed, and a whole cast of characters joined the fold and it was a lot of fun but it got so involved, especially when everyone thought I should do a book about Maisie, well, it had all just gotten bigger than me. After some time off I started drawing again, just drawing, doodly-dooing about, with no pressure or destination in mind. I was having fun again, thinking about doing an illustrated book with simpler drawings and then just maybe one drawing per chapter, but things had gone awry in my life and my whole world was collapsing around me.

In 2019, the year I started drawing and painting Maisie I took a bad fall in my garden and couldn’t get up. After lying in the dirt for half an hour some neighbors were able to help me up and into the house but I was, by then, so badly shaken, as were my children, that I ordered the Mobile Help device unit with a “Fall Pendant” I can now never take off. For the next 3 years I began taking more and more falls, once being laid up for 3 months, but last October I took a really bad fall in my kitchen and, unlike other times when I eventually recovered, this time I didn’t. And it turns out that I had another blood clot, a serious one in the same leg I’d had one in before, and somewhere in the middle of all of this I had injured my leg so badly that once the bloodclot was gone I still had very serious, now chronic pain. I’ve written about this before and won’t go on now, other than to say I am disabled for life and all my hopes and dreams seemed to have vanished.

And then I realized, slowly, that while there were now a host of things I could no longer do, there WERE many things I could do and drawing was one of them. I also realized that where I had gone wrong with Maisie was getting so big and so complex with a book on the horizon that I had somehow shifted into what felt like “artist” territory and that became like an albatross around my neck. I never set out to be an artist, I just wanted to draw.

Slowly I have crept, somewhat shyly, back to the sketchbook. And I did something else that was, for me, a real game changer. I had tons of dips pens, all kinds of nibs and inks but I hadn’t used them in a long time. I used to do calligraphy, and I liked to write with them in my journals. I knew people drew with pen and ink but I never had. One day, after slowly assembling bottles of ink (some dried out of course so I bought 1 bottle of black Indian Ink and 1 bottle of Japanese permanent black ink used for manga so that they could dry and then I could use watercolor or other mediums). The first time I got bold enough to try to draw with pen and ink I was very nervous but I was only drawing for myself, no one had to see it, but Holy Honkin’ Hallelujah I fell in love with it at the first stroke. Yes I made messes, I made mistakes, but I didn’t care about that. I just kept drawing.

The thing about drawing with pen and ink, and the drawings I produce (Note: I said “I” because I know everyone uses the medium in different ways and some do amazingly complex works.) is like meditation to me. You have to go slow. You have to be careful not to smudge the ink because it takes a bit for it to dry, so I went slower and slower and the drawings have been getting better and better, at least to me. And then I had this funny little thought today. Drawing with pen and ink vs. other mediums and the very slow process that it is is so relaxing it made me relax, and further, drawing the ladies like the one in the header of this site and the one at the top of this post are singular subjects, not big canvases of complex worlds. For me, just today, I thought it was akin to writing a haiku instead of a sonnet. Small, but powerful. It causes the mind to make a big leap saying everything you want to say, everything you feel, in one image instead of a whole scene. I have fallen in love with this and now I can’t imagine drawing any other way and I draw multiple pictures a day and I just never want to stop drawing.

So where does this bring me today? I honestly don’t know. I have been a lifelong writer. I have written for magazines and newspapers, I have written books, zines, and published all manner of little publications, writing has been my natural way of being in the world, but now, at 68, and with my limitations, I have gotten very slow in everything I do, out of necessity. And very small. And I realized just recently that instead of having BIG goals I now have small ones. Small, slow, like a snail gliding along slower than a breath, and that suits me just fine. I will just keep drawing, and drawing will take me where I need to go.