Artist LC

 The flower palate here is very limited, but I find the triangular pattern that the flowers make, give a pleasing look to this picture of Chrysanthemums. It encourages me to return to pastelling flowers when my ability to hold the pastel returns. It feels good to draw in a range of styles with a range of subjects. I am limited to my choice, to an extent, by being home bound. As Spring comes on, more flowers will open up in my beautiful cottage garden giving me more opportunity to explore them.

To me the eyes are the most important thing to get right. They convey so much of the person. I love to do portraits because of the expression which is ever changing. A face never stays the same, even though the features are consistent. There are so many different nuances and looks.I find it so interesting to study a face whether a dog or a person. They all have their own unique moments to try and capture

  This poster art 2017 was designed by my husband Greg, to accompany one of his songs  (   https://gregcrowhurst.bandcamp.com/track/give-us-hope .   The art work is a pastel self-portrait I had drawn. It highlights the starkness of a pain-filled half empty paralysed body, illustrated by the shadow.it also illustrates the strength and hope of each new day

We just heard that my husband won the Wondershare Claim Your Space Challenge with the video More than Pain, about my art, which gave me great confidence and affirmed me as an artist, despite profound disability.. We are so happy that it won, but sadly, we have been struggling with the level of disability severity recently and we did not see the message that it it had won. Safly it is now too late to claim the prize. But it’s a great statement about his video skill and my art/my life! https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=Q8Su2vxE2LQ&feature=youtu.be

I struggle to convey my experience. So many efforts to convey it down the years.  I had hoped to be able to do more pastels. I really love them, their feel, the colours, the clarity and detail they bring. The joy of my fingers smudging them on the paper. I seem to be addicted to looking for more different sorts of pastel to try, yet in truth I have more than I could ever use.  This love, this desire to get the right colour also drives me. I find it so hard despite a really great choice of quality pastels, to find just the right colour when I draw my corgi. Up at 2am last night with insomnia, I could not help but purchase a small set of burnt sienna shades. Fingers crossed they will help me get a more accurate colour. Yet I fear  my next drawing will have to wait, maybe days, more likely weeks, even months or longer. Instead it must suffice that I stroke the screen with one finger and continue to express the inexpressible anyway that I can. For to not express it is to comply with the cr

  I am proud  and honoured to say this pastel was featured in an article about my art in a New York Disabled Artist Network Newsletter, thanks to my dear friend Sanda Aronson, who started the Disabled Artist Network in 1985. She asked me to share some of my art in August 2011. She dedicated a whole edition to me, for which I was beyond delighted and moved that she would like my work. This piece is about the continuous head pain I have endured for 30 years and the intensity of the throbbing headache that I repeatedly experience on top. The pain is disabling. The red pastel conveys some of the pain I feel, pain all around, not just inside my head. I just found an old email that described how doing the pastel had given me a worse headache. I came across it the other day looking through my earlier work. It was all very beautifully laid out. I felt it was a real recognition of me as an artist.

 I named this picture Lost because it is exactly how I felt. I had lost my awareness, my ability to tolerate anyone in the room with me. My mind was gone. My memory reduced or non existent.  I do not remember exactly what date I did this pastel. It is at least 12 years ago though if not longer. I do remember making it though.  I was in a greatly deteriorated cognitive state and having worked on the pastel for days, over weeks and months, to get an accurate picture, I was so blank and diminished visually that I could not do any fine detail, so it seemed that the only thing I could do was take a pastel and swoosh it across my portrait, to try and depict the devastation in my head.  I felt sad on the one hand to seemingly destroy a portrait of myself in this way, that had taken so long to create, but I could barely focus or see. I could not think. I could not understand incoming information. This remains true today, though it comes and goes a little more now, so that I have brief moments

Ravaged by pain and paralysis, I continue to wait for better moments.  I drew these two pictures the other day on my iPad. I try to communicate the internal experience so that there is some level of understanding of my inner reality and why I can do nothing. The first picture captures the inner agony, the second tries to convey the experience of my life, a constant rollercoaster of tormented living and complete inability. It feels like continually moving through mountains and ravines of torment, from which I daily try to climb out of the troughs and remain in a stable moment of calm that rarely if ever exists.

  I hope to draw the daffodils. They are just coming out in the garden. I had some delivered with my shopping. They bring such life and joy to a room.  Yellow flowers are a real challenge, I find. It is very easy to make them flat and two dimensional. Hard to bring out their beauty. I cannot draw today. I remain hopeful, contemplating how I might catch something of their loveliness and vibrancy. Maybe I will just draw them in pen and ink…..still, I remain hopeful…

  Today I am longing to pick up a pastel and draw, but my coordination is off, my left side completely paralysed, my left hand useless. This seems to disorientate me. I must be visually impacted too. I try to draw with one finger on my tablet but it is weirdly uncomfortable and more difficult than usual. I just struggle to get any ease of flow. There were lots of errors that needed attention. Luckily on the computer it us easier to alter mistakes than with a real pastel. I feel lopsided and uncoordinated. But at least I recorded something of the shape and beauty of the tulips as they twist and contort, dying elegantly and beautifully before going on the compost bin to feed the earth.

  I am excited to share my new logo with you. It was a happy moment designing it with my husband who is an awesome web designer. It is too complicated for me visually and cognitively to do this by myself. How happy that he has a new app that means he can work on the iPad and so we can discuss it together in the same room. My noise sensitivity prevents me from tolerating the sound of a keyboard on a desk top or lap top computer.

 On a difficult, painful, unable day, it is sometimes easier to express and describe visually what it feels like, rather than struggle through a blanked mind to extract words that simply cannot convey the experience. When holding the pastel or pencil is impossible, sometimes it may be possible to slide a single finger across the tablet screen to try to illustrate the intolerable.

Looking through my old art books was intriguing. I stopped being able to paint self portraits for many years.  Even before that it was only very occasional that I could do it, due to the amount of time spent in bed or paralysed in a chair. Now my cognitive ability is so much worse too. I have only recently tried again. On first looking at this picture, it looks quite ordinary, but as I look closer I see my mouth is shut tight, my lips are in fact stuck together, my face swollen on the left side, my eyes looking in slightly odd directions. This is all due to physical paralysis of the facial muscles on the left side. It highlights for me the invisibility of suffering, the difficulty in perceiving the inner anguish and agony. But I think it also highlights a dignity and strength required to survive this over decades.  

  We came across these old photos of a rare moment when I could move and draw. It must be 15 years old now but highlights the process I have developed over the years, using a white outline on black pastel paper. I find it fascinating to photograph the process and see the image emerge.

  We have a spiritual website called Holyway. When I am struggling with severe pain I like to draw pictures that reflect my faith and use them to illustrate prayers and insights that we post on our blog.. https://holywayjournal.blogspot.com/2019/04/i-pray-for-comfort.html

  The more ill and the less able my brain is to think and my mind to coordinate with my hand to hold  a pastel,  I need to turn to one finger computer art on my iPad, in order to be creative. I have to have an image in mind before I begin which is not always easy or possible. Happily I managed to draw this late night for Valentine’s Day. I really enjoyed creating this whimsical Valentines card. There is something very pleasing when an idea in your mind manifests and works. It has a pleasing balance to me. My husband loved it!

Today we got outside and sat on a bench drinking coffee in the sun. It was a special moment. Whenever we sit in the garden we cannot help but think of our two corgis, who both lived in the garden at different times of our life here. We loved them both so much. When I draw an image in my mind, of us sitting there, I cannot help but add in both dogs, quite different in personality and detail of look.

  Sometimes I start with a simple image. I like it yet there seems to be something missing, so I add something not originally intended. This feels more balanced to me. Yet to my surprise I still felt something was missing. This made me feel happy once I added a corgi.  It felt complete. A sign I need a corgi in my life still.

I find that you do not need a lot of detail to express an emotion or physical experience. Sometimes simple can be best in trying to convey your experience.  I think this relatively quick pastel that I did years ago, easily conveys the pain and describe of head pain more vividly than just saying I have a headache..

 This is an older pastel I did of roses in my garden. Again, it is on black paper, my preferred paper. It encourages me to think again of drawing flowers. I used to paint watercolour flowers and draw pastel lilies. I shall hopefully be inspired more as Spring comes in and more flowers bloom. At the moment the Hellebores are coming to life along with Crocus and Aconites. Fingers crossed for a flower picture.

I love the ease of using a single finger to quickly draw an image in my head. I don’t always want to colour them in, there is something pure, fresh and lovely to me about a single, simple finger drawing.  

 I like to do pictures for my husband to show how much I care about him. I can do this at night often better than during the day. I send them to him as a greeting to brighten his day, as I remain paralysed in bed for many hours and cannot see him first thing.

I don’t always get my images right. I have visual and cognitive issues as well as physical difficulty holding pastels and pencils. Sometimes I find I do not have enough control of a pastel as it is too big and wide for me in that particular moment.  This is a self portrait. I got the eyes too close because I did not take the time to accurately draw the initial outline. I only had limited ability. There was nothing I could do then to change it once coloured in. So every time I look at it it feels wrong and out of balance, but then that is what my life and body are like, completely out of balance. I was not too well when I started this, but wanted to have a go. It was very interesting. I learned a lot doing this picture. I discovered how important the quality of the pastel is for smudging on top of another colour. I used a cheaper pastel without realising and it looked quite chalky on the side of my face. I tried to take it off but that left it not quite as strongly coloured as I intende

 Sometimes I can briefly hold a pastel pencil. I cannot do a big work of art, but prefer the look and feel of pastel on paper to computer sketch. This was a very quick drawing expressing how I was feeling. I was lost and needed spiritual help. There is little colour in the image. It reflects my paralysed, empty body. I love it’s simplicity.

I like to think of both our corgi’s meeting up and saying how much they loved us. I am not always able to hold a pastel or do a more detailed drawing. Then I turn to the computer if possible and use one finger to do a quick outline of the image I have in my head. A bit of whimsy often.

I drew this soon after our dog died. We were both incredibly sad. I like this picture more the more I look at it. It says to me, it is ok to be sad. It is normal to grieve. It felt good to exaggerate the red cheeks to express the pain of loss. I see myself in it more now than when I first did it. I think the red seemed too bright initially. Now I recognise it for what it means.

  I drew this beautiful dog for a dear friend. I hoped to bring some comfort. As I drew her lovely face I felt a real presence of the beautiful nature emanating from the page. It was a privilege and a joy to draw her.

  I love to draw Dogs, especially for people who have lost their beloved companion, as a memory to keep. I  also like to draw self-portraits to express my feelings around disability and the tremendous suffering I endure continuously. My earlier work concerned expression of emotion. Initially I worked with watercolour and drew flowers, when holding a pastel was too difficult, due to muscle weakness and lack of sensation. This picture was drawn as a pastel outline on a black pad then imported into a drawing programme on my iPad so I could continue to complete it as I was unable to continue to physically use pastels at the time . It was quite a lot of effort using a virtual pastel to work on the image.  This is my beautiful Corgi who died last year after struggling with a Degenerative Disorder. Heartbroken, I wanted to make a beautiful picture of him. I think I achieved that.