Pretty Real Behind the Veil

  This is a sketch that I did of the admin at the doctor’s office today.  She had such a warmth and beauty that emanated from her, and I really liked her.  I was originally doing a sketch of the two admins together, but I decided that they should be separated because a) I got a completely different vibe from each—both good, just different, and b) not enough time to finish both, and c) curling lines and shading worked better with the tremors in my hand and my pain levels, for some reason.  So I separated them after I had sketched her and part of him.  It was calming to do.   It’s all done in graphite pencil.  I never even caught her name, but I will definitely ask, as I’ll give her the sketch the next time I see her. This is the first time I sketched an African American woman (I’ve done so few serious drawings of people since I started drawing in July), and I’m pleased with it so far!

The thing about sitting in the waiting room, was that my whole left arm was really painful, and I was having difficulty quieting tremors and spasms in my left hand coming from a progressing shoulder impingement.  ; since I’ve started drawing, the impingement in my left shoulder that severely impaired me through half of undergraduate school, and most of law school has returned, and I couldn’t hold my hand steady enough to draw some lines on my doodle page.  This shoulder problem left me with a frozen shoulder that remained that way for over 5 years, and I had to do all my note taking on a keyboard before laptops were readily available or commonly used in classrooms.  My whole left arm was locked down, and using my hand to do things set off these needle-like sensations up my arm and I couldn’t hold my hand steady at all, and quickly the pain.  Back then I was eventually lucky enough to have a therapist who snapped through enough of the adhesions locking down my shoulder to enable me to move my arm again, and once I’d recovered my mobility, it took years of work in the gym to rebuild the musculature that had been lost to atrophy.  In fact, when I started, the whole left side of my back just sagged and was a fraction of the right side.  After that, I avoided using my left hand as much as possible, though I worked out with my whole body, because I didn’t want to set off the nerve stuff again, since they never knew why it had started in the first place. 

Then, about a month ago, I started getting that weird tingly feeling creeping down my arm, from about the elbow, then increasing muscle spasms and pain, and eventually all the way up to my shoulder again.  I wake up in the morning and I can’t straighten my arm, and it hurts to hold a coffee cup, and I have to apply heat and massage, and pain creme to get the pain tolerable, just to do basic things and break up the stiffness that set in overnight.  Holding a pencil lightly in my hand, or a marker, while using good ergonomics, should not cause this.  I do have rheumatoid arthritis, but I don’t know that is what this is.  So they were backed up  at the doctor’s office yesterday and I had to wait a while, so I sat and drew.  I tried to finish up the last pattern in my newest tangle pattern sheet, but what was left were some mostly straight, short lines, and I couldn’t steady my hand enough to control placement. 

So I set the pattern sheet aside, and got out my sketchbook, instead, and decided to use my meditative pain management methods instead.   I needed to NOT control that hand, because it was not in a state of control, but I DID need to calm myself down, at a minimum not increase the spasms, and try to reduce the pain.  Starting from there just meant focusing on easy marks—squiggles in this instance—and she caught my eye.  I didn’t tell her that I started sketching her while she sat at the window, as I waited to be taken back to see the doc. It because with focusing on her beautiful hair, the soft spirals felt comfortable and relaxed, small enough not to be too taxing, and then I was noticing the graceful curves all over her face, and the way the overhead lights created powerful contrasts against her deep brown skin.  I don’t know how exactly to put words to the feeling of having my gut, eyes, and hands connect powerfully when I was drawing her, as if they knew exactly what to do, like my hands felt exactly what marks to make, and it was resonating from vibes that I got from her.   I only had a very rough sketch at this point, and then they called me back to see the doc.