This is the art of making the best of it.
The gap between what I would be doing if I were healthy and what I am doing is getting wider all the time. Accommodating the limitations imposed on me by my own corporeal existence means an endless series of compromises, negotiations and parallel solutions to make an equivalent of what I want to do.
I can't manipulate large pieces of paper at all so I have to work small. When your arms actually don't stretch wide enough to handle A3, the scale of the world shrinks.
Pain and weakness mean I can't apply sufficient pressure to the tools to make the etchings I would settle for making, let alone the woodcuts I long to make.
Myoclonic jerks mean I can't safely handle anything sharp or pointed, and anything involving wet media is asking for trouble.
One could, from a glass-half-full perspective, label it as necessity being the mother of invention. All last summer, immobilised and coming apart at the seams with pain, while waiting helplessly for Bill to complete his terrible passage to death, I drew. Every day, all day, with the 'humble' graphite pencil, between doses of dihdyrocodeine, I drew hundreds of things, without thinking, or judging or planning, stumbling or occasionally crawling between bed and desk in a drug and pain daze. I wasn't trying to do anything, learn anything, achieve anything, other than find something I could do which helped. And it did: when nothing else was making any sense, the drawing did. But I think I must have learnt stuff by default, by sheer quantity of doing.
It was the only source of sensory pleasure in my life for those months, holding a pencil, putting graphite on the paper. When every other thing about being a body was hard or disgusting or problematic, the physical act of drawing brought me joy. I had never been fond of the shinyness of graphite, still aren't to be honest, but there was something so seductive about the slickness of pencil on translucent paper (when the rest of me creaked and squealed and growled), combined with the ability to create areas of infinite faintness or a thick mat of graphite, which made the act of drawing and the drawings themselves into an arena of controlled manipulation and invention. I could make a world of my own with a pencil over which I could gain mastery, a curious combination of conquest and liberation.
Holding the pencil became a non-obvious act, since its position in the hand became important in making it do certain things. And short pencils became precious because they were useful in ways long pencils couldn't be.
I learnt about different ways of sharpening pencils - cone points and bullet points. Online shopping brought me different kinds of graphite tool, brands of pencil, graphite sticks and blocks and powder, since I was going through about a dozen pencils a week with ease. I never got picky or snobby about brands or series but discovered the strengths and weaknesses of each, how oily or crumbly they were, how well they adhered to slick paper, how variable the xB designations seemed to be.
But. With all that said, there persists that gap between ambition and actuality. Wishing won't change it. Nor will trying to override it. (I've tried both.) There sits in my head a sense of my self and my drawings not as artist and art but as a child playing with pencils. Yeah, yeah, I hear the objections, but sitting with a pencil in my fist drawing the things in my head makes my feel like a kid. And it's hard to view the products of the act as 'art'. I want them to be, I really do. I want to get better, to understand the medium I've got 'stuck with' and deploy it to its full extent. But ultimately I'm still the kid with the box of pencils and the drawings of her dreams.
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