People have asked me how I paint or draw anything at all (being so ill) and so I thought I’d explain a little bit.

It’s about the same story as with my writing. My neurological and other problems made working on them both extremely difficult.

The series of 5 critters has taken me just over 5 years to complete and it was only that I was delirious and feverish with the flu one day that allowed me to finish at all! (I felt strangely better while I had the flu - something to do with cytokines?). They are the only drawings I was able to do in those 5 years - apart from some wonky hummingbird scribblings anyway! 

The hummingbirds took around two and a half years to complete, but were much more complicated.

Although I ended up painting around 80 or so hummingbirds eventually, I had no more idea of how to go about it by the fiftieth than I had at the second. Because of my memory problems each hummingbird I painted was like my very first one, right until the end. Even while I was painting I was forgetting – I would just finish one wing and then straight away go to paint the next one while I still remembered the technique I’d just used, but it would always already be gone. Even though I’d just done it my mind would be completely blank. I’d even forget, in the 2 or 3 seconds it took to load the brush with paint, which area I was working on.

Frustration is nowhere near being a strong enough word for what painting is like for me now. Gone are the days when I could lose myself in it and it was an escape, it was relaxing even....now very second of it is a battle against my damaged brain asserting itself and stopping me from painting at all.

Sometimes the painting would be going really well concentration-wise but then I would feel a kind of ‘electricity’ course through my brain in a huge wave and suddenly I’d go completely blank and completely forget what I was doing, as well as everything I’d been thinking or had happened in the last 5 –10 minutes before. (Some type of seizure perhaps?) My attention span would then divide itself into increments of no more than a few seconds for some time afterwards making doing anything at all impossible. In fact, I doubt if I’d have been completely sure of my name at the time.

I also had to find a way around the problems with stopping and starting tasks, and with performing tasks with more than one step to them.. I finally got around it by priming the boards, coming up with the ideas, drawing the rough sketches, mixing the paint and then doing the actual painting – all on different days! In fact I often had to wait a week or more between tasks until I could force my brain to be able to complete them. I would just get confused and stare at things with no idea for the life of me what to do next otherwise. It was so ridiculously complicated to have to do things this way, but if I hadn’t come up with these ways around the malfunctioning areas of my brain, I wouldn’t have managed to do any of it at all. It was complicated or not at all.

I’d also continually find myself staring into space with a brush in my hand when I was meant to be painting. I’d kind of ‘come to’ slack jawed and staring at the wall with not a thought in my head and no idea how long it’d been since I stopped painting. I'd sometimes do this 10 times or more in a half hour, I just coundn't stop it.

I could only ever paint between about 11pm and 1am, my ‘healthiest’ time of day. I also had to make sure I did almost nothing all day so I would be well enough to paint by that time. I had to be very careful of how much talking I did that day, how much reading etc.

Some days after I had painted the night before, it was like I had used up all of my brains processing power and so had none left for the next day. I’d wake up unable to think at all, unable to read to speak or even look at things properly, I’d mostly just lie there and stare unfocused and blankly at walls and things until I recovered. Horrible.

But of course, making art at any price is always better than not being able to do any at all. Making art is as vital to me as breathing and it always has been since before I can remember. It’s just that it drives me absolutely mad when people assume that because I can do something, that I do it ‘easily’ or that it means I can also ‘easily’ do other seemingly similar things…sadly it just doesn’t work like that. Being able to do ‘A’ does not mean I can necessarily do ‘B’ as well, it just means that I can do ‘A’, that is all - and I might not ever even be able to repeat that! And nothing I have done since I became ill has ever been ‘easy.’

All the things I do with writing and art are very carefully planned and modified to allow me to be capable of completing them at all. (even if it is still very slowly, with great difficulty and pain and at a low quality level etc.) If I were forced to do things ‘normally’ I think most people around me would be shocked to know how disabled I really am, how easily I am confused and overwhelmed mentally. How poor my short-term memory really is. How much time it takes me to write one of my essays. But as it is, most people around me greatly overestimate my abilities… and although it can be VERY frustrating for me when they do this, it's probably much less scary and depressing than if people knew the truth, I often think.

(Note: currently I find myself unable to paint at all anymore these last 16+ months, this text was written back when I still could.)