Design Draft Draw Well, Be Well 2/15/15

, L L E W W A DR .

L L E BE W jenny & joseph gordon gordon

My Daughter’s Book

of

Reminders

ain tt b ac k ag ok abou e o f b li e s ’ r e u t n o a pic drawing

Book of Reminders

My Daughter’s Book

of

Reminders

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my daughter jenny grew up falling down.

...falling down, under the fierce weight of a disabling genetic condition...

...with a cut chin here, and a black eye there.

it’s a good thing she had her pencils, pens & markers to help draw herself back up to a steadier state of mind.

when she turned 16 she became sleep deprived and fell into a sad, pictureless limbo from late summer till december. she couldn’t sing or draw to save her life. until one night she found the ancient red line of drawing reaching out to her, and she drew again, as she had through out her difficult life: to speed her recovery.

i call these icons and images ‘my daughter’s reminders’ because she drew them in a furious sprint up, down and across the weekly meridian of daily reminders in my outdated date book of 2003. she was drawn to it’s grey pinstriped pages by its beautiful dancing red ribbon. and the pictures she drew in this british made appointment book after her long fall still remind me that sometimes wobbly pictures are worth at least a thousand pictures each. especially when they possess the power to remind someone with a fragile brain and tippy body of the many worldly things that carry her joy. these reminders were the first clear signs that my daughter was finally drawing her way back up from a shattered, scattered and painfully broken state of mind.

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her hands and her eyes -- two of the main keys to drawing -- are compromised. it is her fate to make her pictures with such manual imprecision. and yet, she knows exactly how to draw her way towards what she sees and feels. true, she can’t reach her artist mother’s verisimilitude nor come close to her grandfather’s spitting images of boats sailng off the maine coast. but she can draw everything in a way -- in the way she draws anything she likes. and she loves to draw what she likes -- which includes her freefalling orange peanut shell. “it flies so high it can kiss god,” she said. “it’s too orange -- like the sun -- to crack.”

stuck words may thaw very quickly from up in the icy racks at the top shelf of her brain’s language freezer. the pictures may help remind her that she is not a passive creature, but a thinking one. because the act and action of drawing allows her to make and feel her own marks. this adds up to a very steady pleasure, even after gravity has knocked her down. a long, breath-halting facial pain is very familiar to her as that odd kind of seizure that can make her pencil drop. she’s felt hose sharp needles shooting off in her nose, eyes and mouth at least a thousand times. but the pleasure that’s drawn from a single picture can actually place one of those frightful pains far back onto a distant horizon line. and from there, she’s composed hours of boundless play. picture-making takes the cake, especially when she’s taking her pick-up sticks straight through the straits of a fatiguing weariness. Like when jenny is sketchily heading towards a bellylaughing red island, one with nice eastern eyes. it’s a comforting sort of place drawn out in the middle of somewhere. the kind of place chocked full of mangos, cherry pineapple longboats, and exotic birds with bright paper kite feathers. it has a sweeter than here kind of form that can be pictured strong enough to re-shape a very poorstarting day. today was like that. and yet the moment she starts playing with all her colors, she’s got a good chance of finding some fresh balance and real peace from her head pains down on the table top, that holds up the infinite rectangles of a boundless paper universe.

I have no paper fright,� she boasted. indeed she’s never erased a single line. as there is nothing to correct in any picture she makes. they all have their place for at least a few moments, before they hit the recycle bin.

these pictures she made in a furious sprint to recover her missing self ten years ago remind me of the loneliest year she suffered after falling from her fragile sleep at a sleep away camp. her shattering fall deprived her of entire sheets of her memory. then she lost her will to draw entirely. she fell picture-less and song-less for four months. she froze in that hard to locate place where unrecoverable sleep falls... A place where even once easily retrieved pencils roll beyond a father’s reach.

then, on a cobalt blue night in late december, she returned to her sturdier place by following the dance of a bright red ribbon placemark that hung from the top of my outdated book of reminders. from there she began her pulsating ascent to the ancient crimson line thin, wavering line which reappeared in the shine of a bright red ribbon place mark dancing from my outdated book of weekly reminders. that bright crimson line re-lit her scattered mind. and sparked her return to her wobbly yet certain place on the ancient red line of drawing.

ah yussel

the wobbly pictures my daughter made in a furious sprint a decade ago remind me that she was born with a rare chromosomal disorder. it’s called I.P. and it was I.P. that brought her into the world with a whole stuck tray of disabling challenges.

on account of I.P. she lacks the balance to stand or walk. and that’s just the tip of her iceberg.

her condition starts at the top of her fragile brain and ends at her toe nails

why are you so drawn to picture making? someone once asked her. simple, she said. you can move anything everywhere you want. wherever you want. i can’t do that anywhere. but i can with a pick-up stick. sometimes i can’t if a no 2 falls to the floor. so just be patient.

with her centrally disordered nervous system, jenny’s fall from sleep at sleep away camp severely deprived her. after she fell and shattered, she suffered through a long, discordant stretch of time. she could niether see clearly who she was, or where she wanted to go. these pictures she made in a furious sprint helped her to speed up her slow recovery. and ten years later, they also serve to help me recover my hard to hold memories of a daughter whose life was hard from the get-go. yes,

the movable pigments that a friction stick releases fly beyond the hum-drum lines of predictable routines. she’s found sheer joy in that unerasable feeling of physical freedom. and it all starts from the dull point of a no. 2 pencil

they remind of how utterly lost she was. it took a full year for her to fully recover what had scattered from her fragile brain. but when she finally restored her lost habit of drawing for hours, her grey days and nights began to rouge up. and with drawing came her reconnection to the people and animals who populated her shaky world.