New York Made Me Sick, So I Must be Drawing Again

I spent a crazy weekend in New York doing a bunch of my favorite things with my favorite person (my husband Jim):

• saw my favorite band, Turin Brakes
• visited the Museum of Modert Art
• attended a Broadway musical (West Side Story)
• did a long run in Central Park
• ate the best NY style pizza - Joe's on Carmine St. in Greenwich Village
• posed for yet another photo with a lion sculpture (at the NY Public Library)
• had a bottle of Magners (which doesn't seem to exist in Cleveland)
• took a picture of the Chrysler Building

It was a weekend that lingers, not only in my memory, but in my lungs in the form of yet another illness. This one was especially custom-made for Jim -- a virus that caused several days of laryngitis. Unfortunately for me, it also caused several days of missed training because of difficulty breathing.

After the asthma attack in Virginia and now this, I have decided to designate this month as "The Great Lung Disaster of 2010."

But for every negative, there must be an equal and opposite positive, right? The positive from GLD2010 is that I'm drawing again. The creative juices started flowing as they always do after some kind of mental or physical breakdown. The images were coming and all I needed to do was find time to draw them (not an easy task with all my training).

While we were in New York hanging out with friends, the subject of my art came up, and I showed them some of my drawings. Then it happened. One of them said something I always wished, but never thought, I'd hear -- he compared my drawings to the art of H. R. Giger. It may have been the singular biggest compliment anyone ever gave me. It was all I needed.

No, wait! I needed one more thing: time. And almost like clockwork, along came the "thwack" from above -- in the form of a virus. Can't train? I guess I'll draw. My pursuit of artistic expression was reborn. Is it a calling? I don't know. What I DO know is that I want things to be different this time. I feel that I should to set goals (a drawing a week perhaps?), but art was never something I could force. It always just "happened." It came as a spur-of-the-moment need to produce something, to "get it out." Maybe if I make time for it, things COULD be different this time. Maybe there's room for something else besides training and work in my life. Sometimes I feel that, at my age, it may be now or never.

Here's a photo of my newest drawing, still in progress (because I'm training again) and tentatively titled "The Great Lung Disaster of 2010":