Gesture Lines

This has been a tough week. Why? Because I feel better yet not enough better. For the last two months I’ve slept or sat. That was fine as long as I was too weak to want much else. But now I’m stronger. Still weak, but strong enough to get to a few social events, if only briefly. Strong enough to visit the flower beds in my yard, not strong enough to actually weed them. Strong enough to set out ingredients for making bread, not strong enough to bake it. The frustration has me in a temper. But I’m too tired to vent it. 

Painting, specifically gesture lines, offered some guidance for me in this phase of healing. I assume it’s a phase since everyone I’ve talked with who has had surgery or an illness seems to know about this state of mind. Better but not better enough is very bad.

The textbook definition of a gesture line is it's the simplest representation of an object. For example, from left to right above, are gesture lines for a book, tree, elephant, dachshund, and van. If the last three look alike, they are. I used the same gesture lines. A lot of things are similar when simplified.

My style, though, is to push past mere objects and see if a gesture line can be emotion. At far left is the line that seemed to best sum up my week only what did I say to me? I tried to figure that out by expanding the line into drawings. One became an arm tossing a ball. Am I trying to fling away my problems? Another bit of doodling gave me a fish. Do I feel trapped, about to be snared on a hook? Yet another squiggle session gave me a dog begging for a play session.

The dog seemed closest to my true mood when I first drew it. Maybe my real frustration is I’ve been too weak to use this time off work for some genuine goofing off. This insight did not fully satisfy, though, and I tried again. Using the same gesture line once more gave me the horse in flight below. Rotating the line clockwise gave me the lazy grazer below it.

The flighty horse knows something comes and wants to run; the lazy horse knows something comes as well but is willing to pretend to some normalcy. Both are me at the moment. Something very big is out there and I don’t know what to do.

I’ve done this exercise before, though never when the stakes actually mattered. In the past, tossing a few gestures around helped build a composition.This time the doodling reduced my illness to simple expression, easier to understand. Didn’t solve anything, but understanding at least eased my bad temper.

If a painting grows from this, I’ll post it here when I finish it. In the meantime I’m wondering if this sort of exercise is thinking as an artist does? Or am I just stalling to avoid painting? Or healing?