Susanna, the Sheep and My iPad

This photo just popped up from my cloud:

     Susanna, in a red and white gingham dress, was talking to a sheep. Speckled beige wool poked through a wire cage at the Prospect Park Zoo. We had just fed the ducks and chickens.  Over and over, we dropped quarters upon quarters into the corn and seed filled vending machines, as her four-year-old fingers caught and tossed the food. She had no interest in stopping or moving on. Just Susanna, the animals, and the kindness of feeding. I have never since met anyone as charitable or ethereal as my daughter. I miss her always.

     The last time I wrote a blog post for Susanna’s Golden Ball was December of last year. This was around the time I purchased an iPad Pro and Apple Pencil. I downloaded the Procreate app and haven’t been the same since.

    I had been drawing again for a few months, mostly with woodless colored pencils (I still love those), and not showing my work to anyone. After talking with my life coach, who helped me sort through some things, I had decided to make a little art each week. At some point I wondered whether the smooth pencil surfaces were a segway to drawing with a stylus. They were.

    I watched a few tutorials and mastered how to make repeat patterns. I drew ice cream and cinnamon rolls, pandas, koalas, sheep. I drew platform shoes and vintage swimwear. Anemones and jellyfish, sunflowers, pussy willows. I drew lots of microbial beings, especially ones with polka dots and cilium. Organic shapes and rich colors poured from the tiny pencil tip. They seemed to live not on physical sheets of paper but in the ethers, like Susanna. I drew with joy, like I did when I was five, and again when I was seventeen.  I drew dancing women with long hair, as I did in high school. I drew some of the single images I used to paint in oils on wood panels in my studio. I shared a walk-up space under the Brooklyn Bridge in Dumbo, back when there was not much happening there.

    The deep emotions that come from being an artist came back. I once again felt the urge to make things, in such a big way that it was not only about me anymore. This was the powerful urge that convinced me to move to New York by myself in my thirties, with no money, to make my art. Art is strong. Art helps people become themselves. Art heals, it is even healing me. Art survives death, time and again.

    I do not know if the pain of losing my Susanna, so abruptly and unfairly, will ever go away. I doubt it, not in this lifetime. But this pain and grief belongs not just to me, but to humans. If we keep living, we lose those we love, then we die too. It’s these truths that unite us, scary as that is.

    I cannot say that my drawing habit made me retire early from my teaching job in June, but it was certainly a contributing factor. I could no longer resist the calling to do something more and something better. I am on a mission now. I am adding tech skills and learning about marketing, so that I can draw more.

    I need people to know about this. When things are hard, and make no sense, creating something makes me whole again.

Follow my art at these links:

https://www.instagram.com/trishfreer/

https://www.electricpastrydesigns.net/et/