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After Brain Damage, the Creative Juices Flow For Some


From the LA Times:

“Before the stroke in 1997, her mixed-media paintings featured strange and cryptic images: medieval seals, transvestites, bingo cards. Reviewers called her work cerebral and deliberate. Creativity, says the UC Berkeley professor, was an intellectual and often angst-filled struggle.

After the stroke, she could no longer paint on canvases mounted vertically, so she laid them flat, moving around them in a chair with wheels. She learned how to work with her left hand; it had less fine motor control but was more free and natural in its movements. She began to use different, less toxic types of paint, which led to new kinds of visual effects.

And she began to more deeply explore the beauty of blood vessels in the brain after seeing some of her own brain scans.

Critics called the new work intuitive and raw, more vibrant, abstract, expressive.”

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I Close My Eyes To See

I close my eyes to see
The digital book, I Close My Eyes To See by Dan Rhema and Kevin Wilson, is a both a visual and verbal guide to Dan’s near-death experience due to Dengue fever that he contracted while in Mexico. Dan sustained neurological damage, which affects his memory, sensory processing and sense of reality. However, his illness also left him with a compulsive need to create artwork, something he had not done since he was a child, helping him to make sense of his past and present experiences.

This book captures the imagination—especially for those of us who are interested in a first person perspective of neurological illness, the road to recovery and coping through the use of art. It reminds us that “life finds a way”, a common theme in Dan’s artwork, which brings hope to anyone experiencing a similar injury, family members, friends and those who work with this population.

Lastly, I want to acknowledge Dan’s courageousness. Due to the dual modes of story telling, through words and art, Dan’s struggle is felt deeply and is clearly a genuine self-exploration. One does not come across such authentic pieces of art often, which makes this book a wonderful find.