I want to share a piece of creative inspiration with you.
It sits at the corner of my art table in a simple black frame.
This piece of artwork was not done by a famous artist. It’s not a reprint of an old master’s painting or a piece from a gallery.
It’s an ink drawing by my mother.
She drew it as she lay in the hospital fighting a losing battle against cancer.
I remember receiving a phone call from mom during one of her many lengthy hospital stays. It was mid-morning and I was just fixing to head up there for my daily visit. She sounded frustrated. She asked me to bring a pad of paper and some colored pens with me.
“I’ve got to do something with my hands,” she said, ” or I’m going to go nuts!”
Eighteen months of cancer treatment had taken a huge toll on her body, but her creative spirit was alive and well. She was an artist and she could not spend one more day in that hospital bed without creating something! She worked on her “doodling” untold hours as she lay in that hospital bed day after day, week after week.
Her eyesight had been ruined by radiation treatments, and she couldn’t see to do the detailed needlework and beading that she had done before her illness. But she could still hold a pen and enjoy the rythmic motion of drawing lines and patterns.
After she went home to be with the Lord, I found several of her pen drawings in her Bible, all with different verses and poems written on them.
I love this drawing.
I admire the details: the unexpected inclusion of color, the abrupt changes of pattern, the myriad lines and tiny pictures tucked in. Though it has bittersweet memories for me, it also makes me smile. I’m just like my mom. I, too, have to do something with my hands or I feel like I’m going to go nuts!
This drawing also reminds me that art can be simple. It doesn’t have to be an exquisite oil painting or a flawless marble sculpture to bring joy and inspiration to others. I’m totally inspired to create when I look at this drawing. It it amazing that my mom could draw something this cool half-blind with just a drug-store pad and felt pens.
The picture is so finely detailed that my camera would not focus in well. I tried to take several shots of different parts of it so you can see how wonderful it is!
Want to see my mom and I? We are the two happy faces squeezed in at the top of photo #4.
I love drawings like this one, mostly because I’ve never been able to make patterns blend together so seamlessly. These are so neat to look at!
Your mom was an amazing woman and this is an awesome piece of art. Every time I think of her it makes me smile because she was such a character when we were kids.
Thank you Alida–yea, she was deifinitely a character all right. She always liked you a lot, and that’s saying something because she was picky when it came to my friends. Little did she know….heehee 🙂
wow. that is very cool.
i also have lots of great memories of your mom. she was for sure the craziest mom of the group. it seemed like she did things the way she thought was best, not what everybody around her thought was best. i like that.
Thank you Lori 🙂 She really was one-of-a-kind. I appreciate your kind words so much !
This is beautiful! I love the little happy faces of the two of you.