New Pastel

Sunflowers, Torrey Pines” was inspired by a hike in Torrey Pines Natural Reserve on the trail between Razor Point and Yucca Point in the late spring of a particularly wet year. Much of the year, this trail as covered with dry vegetation and is spectacular for it’s sculpted sandstone formations. On this particular day, the bones of the hillside were hidden by the abundant display pf California sunflowers, soft and lush and and green.The trails are very fragile and are actually closed during and after rainfall for at least a day and sometimes longer, so I have never seen water cascade down this small cataract.

trying something different

I hesitated to attempt this painting at this time in my life, because my vision loss had made it so difficult to accurately place my strokes where I want them on the page. This results in a looser painting than has been my norm. In all my years making art I have relied on freehand drawing and I knew that my visual challenges would make it impossible for me to draw the bridge freehand. I learned from another artist that Georgia O;Keefe, at the end of her life and also battling with macular degeneration, used aids to guide her placement of color on her work so so maybe maybe I could do what it takes to make the image I wanted to make.

visual experience  as macular degeneration pprogresses

It is interesting to observe this journey of vision loss. While I still can with peripheral vision well enough to do many things that make me appear normal to ovsrvors, I am aware of changes that interfere more and more.

For a long time, I experienced the loss of central vision as a vague neutral blank area almost like a small could of fog in the visual field. Because the brain tries to fill in the gaps with what it expects to see there, and because the eyes naturally sweep across the scene to gather detail, I could sometimes imagine that I am actually seeing everything out there. I would only notice how the blind spots were impact me if I consciously thought about it a which point I would notice my little cloud of fog that took on the general coloring of what was around it, but lacked any detail. I would notice, when cutting vegetables or reading on the computer screen, that the blind spot was increasing, making those activities harder.

For a while that cloud like phenomenon has been sprinkled with tiny points of light, like stars winking on and off. And more recently, the blind spot has taken on a couple of new personas. (Different light conditions seem to influence which of these I will experience at any given time.)

One is that the whole floating cloud becomes a stained glass image complete with heavy black lines separating the colors, and with panes of orange red, and either blue or green. At the center, there is always a series of panes that I read as a face tipped sideways. The top of the face is always on the right and the bottom always on the left. This face sometimes appears to be male, sometimes female, and sometimes animal, most often feline. I can only surmise that this is an artifact of brain’s attempt to make meaning out of what it is experiencing when the optic nerve is firing but not in response to actual visual stimuli. Understanding that the way macular degeneration progresses is that tiny spots are failing while many adjacent spots are still functioning, I have to assume there is still some visual information coming through this sieve but that the malfunctioning receptors are creating patterns that the brain wants to play with.

Under other light conditions, there is what seems to be a smaller floating image that is white and vaguely oval with heavy dark marks. At first the features seemed to be a face in the same orientation as described above, but like a caricature of Charlie Chaplin – heavy dark eyes and the thick mustache. As this one has changed over a couple of weeks, it now appears to be eyes and a black silhouette of a large animal – deer or camel perhaps – in place of the mustache.

These phenomena always appear in the same place in the center of my visual field, so I am sure they track to what is damaged in the retina. I am guessing that the appearance of “faces” is related to the brain being predisposed to find and recognize faces it’s environment.

I am concerned that the appearance of some black areas in consistent locations within the area of disrupted vision is a sign that the clusters of damaged cells growing more dense, like the holes of a sieve becoming clogged with pasta an no longe allowing any light to get through.

While noticing these visual artifacts is interesting and curious to me, they don’t seem interesting enough to try to paint!  It’s more just a curiosity to see what my brain is doing with the changing status of my eyes,