After nearly 75 years with very good sight…suddenly, in September 2022, I became legally blind.  Reading books, driving or seeing anything clearly would never again be possible. “Now what?”, I thought. It was like Paul Simon sings in “Once Upon a Time There was an Ocean…something  unstoppable is set into motion, nothing is different but everything’s changed”.

I was no longer the driver – I was driven everywhere. This passenger couldn’t see the traffic, or read road signs…he had a lot to think about so he looked out the side window. Here in the Blue Ridge Mountains, trees are abundant. Even with my dim sight, I recognized the difference between  pines, maples, oaks, poplars, and locusts – they crowded right up the the edge of the road, filled fence lines, marked streams and rivers, and were the edges of ridges. On a trip to the coast, the palm trees announced their bold presence.

They started talking to me – not in words and sentences, but in feelings that kept drawing me away from my predicament. So I started drawing them – first in a sketchbook with big black markers so I could see them, and then on 30”x22” paper with charcoal sticks.

I sprayed them with a mist of water – a little to make the charcoal darker and then with a lot and tilted the paper to make the charcoal run like tears down the page. I swept over them with brushes to make them smear and streak like a woods in winter rain, or like trees flying by alongside the road. I found that when they dried the charcoal was fixed to the paper and that was good – but better yet…I was happily making art. I was drawing trees with charcoal on paper – both came from paper and water made it work better. 

Eventually I started drawing trees on 6’x4’ stretched canvases. I don’t know where all this is going (and that is the exciting thing about making art) but so far these trees helped me through the first winter of my blindness and started me back to imagining all sorts of possibilities.