Stroke Drawings
A stroke is life changing.
Even a mild one which I experienced in 2024 was strange at first, difficult to understand or even accept.
I went from hiking in the hills one day to struggling to walk unaided the next.
Drawing trees has been my work over many years.
They are metaphors for my self portraits — a permanent visual record displaying old stress wounds and dieback with age.
The stroke left me incapacitated, unable to control my drawing hand and communicate visually.
Except that is what did happen.
The last drawing I completed before my stroke was a dense system of roots beneath a tree: Day 0
Several days later I started to work on a new drawing of this. My brain was telling my creative hand to draw something, the day fear began: Day 9
From this work emerged a series of drawings — which I continued in an attempt to rebuild the damage that had been done.
It became an interesting visual record of my improvement.
Later, I added poems to this “diary”, the captions which accompany these drawings.
The medical language made no sense to me compared to what I was feeling. Language in fact is slow to recover, fewer words are meaningful.