elisem | Entries tagged with art after the stroke

In January of 2011 I had a stroke. Fortunately, I got care immediately, including tPA (tissue plasminogen activator) to bust the clot, and I came through it all with very little damage.Considering that when the stroke was happening I could feel myself losing a bunch of words -- mostly nouns -- and the ability to pronounce sibilants, I feel really lucky. The words came back, and so did pronunciation; I only have the difficulty in pronouncing sibilants that I already had from not being able to hear myself due to my hearing loss of long standing. Anyhow, I digress. Often. Usually at great length. Ahem. Right. Where were we? Oh, essays. Yes.

I got very lucky, but there were some changes from the stroke, some of which affected my art a lot.

Here are four essays I wrote about that:

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1681222.html

Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1681523.html

Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1681756.html

Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
https://elisem.dreamwidth.org/1682015.html

It's probably time for some more essays about this. I'll try to give you a ten-years-later report. In the meantime, there are the earlier essays, and if you have questions, put them here and I'll try answering them, possibly at length in another essay. Thanks for reading.

So after doing those haiku earrings and really having to be dogged about it and not give up, as I said in the last post, I went back to the workbench to work on necklaces and something was different.

Not everything. There were plenty of constants: I still love mixing stone and glass, I have experimented with sparer forms at times, swinging from knotted cord with a few stones in the beginning to the lush early pieces to sparseness again and back and forth and back and forth. I still like doing longer pieces, as they have swing and movement. But there was something new about doing this. It was most noticeable in how I was seeing, which means how I was noticing things in the beads and the juxtapositions of them, and that means there was a difference in how I was composing.

Now's not the time to give you the whole long spiel on how I compose, but suffice it to say that I do not start out with an idea in my head and then go find beads. No, I find some beads and ask them what they want to do, and then do my best to let them have that kind of fun. Grab bags delight me, because two or three beads rolling up against each other give me new ideas all the time. What I do is more aptly called co-creation than design, I think. Anyhow, the important thing is that I use my artistic sensibilities to see how it's going, rather than to dictate and impose how it's going to go.

The piece I did after the stroke that's like my very early sparse work is called "What We Don't Know About Each Other." It's got particular meaningful beads, but I used them differently than I would have before the stroke. Before I would have separated them by beads almost their size, as in a piece like ... hm, I will have to find an example, but the necklace would have been thicker. Instead, these bigger beads are placed just exactly so, and separated by tiny beads.

What seems different to me is that I am seeing meaningful beads vividly right now, and I don’t need to pull back from that in my designs. Or maybe it’s not pulling back that I was doing, but letting them get cluttered. Working out the language will probably take a while, because the experience is still in progress, and how do I describe it when I’m in the midst? Well, I guess that’s what I’m trying to do here.

There are some other examples as well, chief among them being a bunch of opal pendants I made, but I don’t have photos of them handy at the moment. What they are based on, though, is chunks of boulder opal: matrix with veins of rock running through them. I took those, which were drilled as beads, and put them on some twenty gauge sterling silver wire as pendants, and twined them in more silver wire with some Czech pressed glass flowers I’ve been saving for a long time because I loved them so much. The flowers are transparent blue/aqua/purple, and the color variations in each one are lovely and random and good in all the ways real flowers can be when the color melts delicately from one shade to another. If you could see them here, you’d see that the sweep of flower-bearing“branches” of silver wire are less fiddly than I would have done before, more sure, less full of after-the fact ornamentation.

Maybe I’m working on that thing they talk about where the calligrapher practices for a long time in order to be able to draw a circle freehand. I’m not drawing circles, but my curves are not semi-obscured by other ornamentation the same way they might have been at certain times in the past. I don’t dislike what I made before, but this is a new way of doing it for me, and it really pulls me.

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.

So there I was, sorting beads, and it was taking five times longer than it had taken me before the stroke. OK, I thought, giving myself a pep talk, I can learn to do this again in ways that work. I can figure something out. I can do this.

Then I sat down to make some earrings.

Again, I was under time pressure: every year at WisCon I host the Haiku Earring Party, where I give away somewhere between one and three hundred pairs of earrings to people that write haiku inspired by the earrings they choose and the title I give them. I had at least a hundred pairs to make if I wanted to be in any way well-prepared. So I sat down to work... and I froze.

Oh, I didn't freeze right away. I did the thing I usually do for haiku earring-making, which is to set out a bunch of pairs of various beads, usually arranged chromatically on the table, and got my headpins and scrap metal out. (I make haiku earrings mostly out of scrap metal, base metals, using surgical steel earwires, and I often make use of beads kind people have given me. What makes it better is that they're not always the beads I would choose, so I get to (have to!) stretch a little and make stuff that I like out of materials I am not necessarily immediately drawn to. It's a nifty little improve session every time.

Well, usually. This time, I set out beads and wires and got my tools, and picked up a pair of wires to start composing, and I froze.

Seriously, I could not for the life of me figure out how to compose a simple pair of earrings that looked good to me. My sense of proportion, of rhythm, of any of those things, had gone somewhere else and left no forwarding address. It took me twenty minutes to build a simple three-bead pair of earrings. I almost tipped my head down on the table and sobbed. But I didn't. Instead, I built another pair. And then another.

After a dozen pairs, I started noticing that this pair only took about four minutes. (That's still twice as long as haiku earrings take for me to do -- or took -- when I was in the zone.) So that was something. And then I noticed that I was choosing combinations I probably would not have done before. That was another thing, and actually kind of cool, since I liked what I was choosing. But that first pair? That was scary, scary, scary.

However, when I went to the workbench the next time and started to work on necklaces, things had gotten all sorts of easier. I wasn't paralyzed about choices any more. Everything was still overwhelmingly interesting, but I could go ahead and choose, and compose, and see where it took me. More, I started to integrate the new way of seeing what I had made into the assessments I do as I make something. And I think it changed my designs.

I'll try to show you what I mean by that tomorrow, but I wanted to at least post this much in order to move the story past Counting Flax Seeds and the whirlpool I was in at the end of that post, and in order to tell you all that despite choice paralysis that initially had me in its clutches bigtime, there's happier stuff to come.

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.

Years ago, Juan came into my workshop once and found me sorting beads. "Counting flax seeds, sweetie?" he said, cracking me up completely. There are stories about how you can distract various magical or supernatural creatures by strewing before them a handful of small things which they then have a compulsion to count, thus giving you the chance to escape.

I like sorting beads. It's soothing and it's pleasurable and it gives me ideas, when I see one bead roll against another and notice a fortuitous juxtaposition. That's why I've always loved grab bags of mixed beads. Over the years, I got pretty good at sorting beads for particular purposes: these two beads are an earring pair, those seven are for a bracelet; oh, look, these eight would be great in a necklace with the right interlocking sets of colors and shapes to dance with them; hey, these weird ones are so cool that I must save them for something I don't yet understand; these are perfectly nice but boring, and will make good supporting cast for something wilder, and so on.

After the stroke, sorting beads was a lot different, because it was as if the stroke had wiped all my sorting habits. Everything was reset to zero. Each bead I looked at was its own self.

Sorting beads, at first, took five times longer than it had before, or more. And that scared me. How could I work, if I couldn't even sort beads? (I was sorting for Beads of the Month, too, which meant I did have a particular deadline.)

A number of years back, when I started making simple pendants as well as complex ones, I was trying to show people what I saw in individual beads. After the stroke, it was as if the universe was trying to show me how much there was in each individual bead. No, in every individual bead.

Oh, dear. How could I work? I would tip forward into each bead, looking at it, drinking it in, and I'd fall in and drown. That's what I was afraid of, anyway.

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.

I've promised to write this up for a while now, so here's an actual start on it. This is part one, about the change in perception I noticed after my stroke, which happened in the wee hours of January 5, 2011.

After the stroke, once my recovery seemed to be going very well and I had been out of the hospital for a number of days, the excellent neurologist who treated me had a few things to say in case they came in handy. Those things were about some changes in perception and related matters that apparently some people experience who have strokes in the area they figure I had mine. Dr. Azhar was both clear and kind, giving me some information that I bet has been useful in reassuring a number of people, because the effects he was mentioning can be pretty disconcerting.

(Please note: anything I say here is a paraphrase of what Dr. Azhar said, and whatever he actually said was put much better.)

He mentioned, among other things, that some of my perceptions might be more unmediated than I was used to before. When he got to the part about how some people in some places meditated a lot or did other things to achieve such a state of mind, Juan started to make small amused noises, and I was grinning by the time he looked back at me and said, "You may have some experience with this sort of thing already." I allowed as how I could work with that, and thanked him for telling me.

He was right to tell me, and it was indeed happening to me. I've described it to other people since using these words: "I can look at something, and I see it, and I know the name of it. I know the word for it and I can find that word any time I want -- but the word is not between me and it."

It's hard to convey how precisely I mean those words. (Feel free to ask questions.) I'm not being metaphorical in ways people think I am; I'm saying that my perception of something is no longer primarily filtered through the name-and-identification-and-long-history I have with things-that-also-wear-that-word. I'm seeing the thing, not the word. And it was that way with every thing. I saw every thing. None of it was filtered out. And pretty much all of it was interesting.

If any of you know a Liavek story about an art critic who runs afoul of . . . well, circumstances too complicated to explain, really, and he winds up seeing beauty in absolutely every piece of art, then you might understand why I found this whole thing just a bit disconcerting. Well, I would have said worrisome, but at that point, my worrier was still turned off, which is another happy side effect of my stroke, at least for a while. Still, seeing every thing is pretty amazing. There are reasons why people do all that meditation and other stuff to get there.

The difficult part came when I sat down to sort beads. And I'll write more about that soon. For now, if you have questions, please do ask; answering them might help me make more sense of this in words that can be shared.

Art After the Stroke, Part One: Seeing Every Thing
Art After the Stroke, Part Two: Counting Flax Seeds
Art After the Stroke, Part Three: Frozen in the Fields of Plenty
Art After the Stroke, Part Four: And By My Eyes Be I Open
... and more to come.