New video:  Vintage Koh-I-Noor Rapidograph Four-Pen Set No. 3065-S4

During my ten minutes of a near-death experience, I saw a tunnel and two relatives at the end of it.  I have been exploring what may have been between me and the end of that tunnel.  Much of what I have drawn is faces.  I have depicted them as faces, but I think they were closer to being "the essences of souls".

#1001 Face No. 11, copperpoint on gouache on paper

Can we live without color?  A few years ago I wrote a page for my website about how artists in a bad economy should not forget about graphite and pencils.  My high school teacher taught me a simple life-long lesson- if you can't draw it, you won't be able to paint it.

When I got hit by lightning, I lost my color perception.  One appointment with my doctor was especially both rewarding and heartbreaking.  After hearing about my painting and thinking, he said "You are like Vincent.." and he was about to finish "Van Gogh", but as soon as I heard "Vincent", my heart was beating double-time.  Vincent van Gogh has always been my favorite artist, since high school at least, if not earlier.  He could paint orange and green and make you see a rainbow. (Do not mention Thomas Kinkade to me, may he rest in peace).

For at least 20 years I headed down a path similar to Vincent van Gogh's, although I didn't plan it.  My doctor is the one who confirmed I hear color instead of seeing it, and he said that a use of a slight dissociative disorder that I have enabled me to put the colors aside as I heard them and painted.  Joy at having a professional "brain and thinking" doctor tell me something I guess I knew all along.  I understood Vincent van Gogh truly, whereas it took me about 20 years to understand and appreciate Picasso.  I think Picasso was painting math, while Vincent was singing the world.

The heartbreak in that doctor's appointment was that we were determining that I had actually lost my perception of color since getting hit by lightning.  I left that appointment thinking I would work in different color media until I got my color back.  That was at least a year and a half ago.  I can work in color, and I know how I did it before - BUT - I now hear color in gray.  When I would start an oil painting, whether abstract or traditional, my use of color was a satisfying pattern.  It was like baking a cake- I could do it in my sleep.  Did I mention I don't sleep now? lol- I don't reach REM sleep anymore since the lightning either. I dream while I am awake, my brain shuts down every once in a while, but it isn't when I am trying to sleep.  They are calling this epilepsy.

I have spent the last week going through some of my paintings, in oil, oil pastel, pen and ink of course, gouache.  I think I have found that I hear in gray and then if I were to use color now, I am transcribing the grays into colors. Steel Gray.  My world is steel gray.

As I work on depicting the near-death experience of the lightning strike, I had found already that the "tunnel" I saw when the event happened was gray.  It wasn't white like some other people have described, mine is gray.  I say "is" because I think that we each have a tunnel- a way to heaven when we die.  I believe I saw mine when I got hit by lightning, that I held onto having my son and staying here, I lost the ability to speak, and lost my previous perception of color before I saw the tunnel, when the lightning hit the right side of my head..

And now, my page on graphite is calling to me.  It isn't a bad economy that has me leaning toward simple materials and gray scales, it is being struck by lightning.  Where does a colorist who thinks like Vincent van Gogh turn when the world turns gray?  Metalpoint, and a literal use of gray.  Steel gray metal on gouache or marbledust, rabbitskin glue and wood.  I don't want to transcribe my world, I want to draw it directly.  I always have preferred to work "from life" instead of models, and trying to assign colors to a gray scale is not how I want to work.

The above photo is how I hear color now.  The same photo below, in color, is a noisy conglomerate of mush to me, someone else's painting.

I did a couple of things using a steel stylus yesterday- steel gray in the literal use is a very light-colored material.  Much lighter than copperpoint or even goldpoint.  I'm worried that if I work in steel only, I will always be trying to add the contrasting darks instead of allowing the light to be enough.  We will see...

If you are interested in working with metalpoint, you can see my pages here.

Laurie A.E. O’Meara, Artist and Horticulturist Twitter: @laeomtweets  FaceBook  Videos: YouTube

Below is what I wrote when I first started working on "Through The Tunnel" (c)

"Through The Tunnel"

In 2009, I was hit by lightning during a thunderstorm while I stood at my kitchen sink doing dishes.  When you know you shouldn't be doing dishes during a thunderstorm, and well, there were only a couple of dishes to do, and the storm wasn't that bad yet......well, the shock threw me to the floor, I couldn't speak but for "Gaaagh, gaagh"..trying to speak, trying to form words.  I felt myself fade to black, only it was grey.  I saw my grandfather and a Native American elder at the end of a long tunnel.

It took me four years to fully address what had happened.  I knew it, could "see" it, but didn't face it.  At the time, the right side of my face was bruised and blue. And, typical for me, I didn't go to the hospital, I went to bed.  And for those four years couldn't quite get why my left side would just stop working, why my arms would cramp up, why my speech would stop, why I have nerve damage to my face.

In 2012, my mother died, very suddenly.  I was lost.  And in order to find myself, I had to back up and face the lightning strike, and the damage to my thinking, to my physical being.  For about a year now, I have not been painting very often.  Until last week, when I saw a doctor who finally started helping me put pieces back together.

We discussed that I hear color instead of seeing it, that I was afraid I had lost my touch with the correct use of color.  But I came home and did a couple of small paintings.  They were in brown.  Without going into all the medical details, I'm a colorist at this point in my life, they should not have been brown.  So, I started a bright whale painting.  And color hurt - it hurts my eyes, hurts my head, just hurts. My color perception has been thrown- whether by the lightning, or by a condition called being a "migraineur".  Prone to constant migraines, only in my case, again perhaps because of the lightning, I don't feel the pain, so my body keeps going, even though it's in a full migraine state.

To heal, I feel I need to first work in brown and then work back into color.  I've been working on this very hard for a few days.  And all I seem to be able to do is draw faces. In my near-death experience, I have remembered the end of the tunnel, perhaps because my grandfather was there.  It occurred to me this morning, what about that whole long length of the tunnel?

What if that was a space of living thought, of faces, people, activity, between life and death.  I can't get to my grief for my mother if these faces are in the way, and I can't fully pull back from that tunnel until I face my mother's death. I lost her and I don't know where she is.  If these faces are keeping me holding onto that tunnel, well, I won't get my own life back. She isn't in my tunnel, I don't think, so hopefully when I again get to the end of the tunnel, past the faces, maybe then color won't hurt. Maybe then I can paint a flower for my mother, or finish the oil of a bench just like the one she enjoyed sitting on.

(note added August 29, 2014- I am finding that working in browns and neutral tones is not helping.  I will continue to do these face drawings, but I feel I also need to push myself to work in a familiar full color range in order to keep my overall color perception accurate.  I am supposed to be focusing on pain so my brain realizes I am in a migraine state.  There was no pain in that tunnel. )

My thirty-six years as a Fine Artist had been recorded on my website PenStroke Studio. 

For several months I have been working on depicting my near-death experience, and it is titled "Through The Tunnel" (c). I have been drawing images of Saint Michael, faces in graphite, faces in crayon, my view of my tunnel at the moment I almost died, and pears.

Going through my paintings over the last 30 plus years, pears have been a common subject when I am expressing emotion.

A well-known meteorologist helped me figure out the date of the storm that caused the lightning which had hit me and caused my near-death experience.  And my mother died.

I mention my mother because she died after I got hit by lightning, and although I am well-learned in religious belief and in the aspect of God, I have no feeling whatsoever as to where my mother is.

Right now, I am missing my mother, seeing my own tunnel, seemingly stopped in time on May 16, 2012, the date my mother died, and knowing I have to draw.

My doctor knows that I used to "hear" color instead of seeing it.  I had told him that after I got hit by lightning, color hurts.  It hurts- hurts my eyes, hurts my brain.  I had been a botanical artist, but also a colorist.  I think I now "see" as an artist, or rather in my case, "hear" in black and white or gray.  The tunnel I saw after I got hit was gray.  The lightning hit me on the right side of the head, the creative side of the brain.  My forehead and the right side of my face were damaged, including the major facial nerve on that side.

So, me, a Fine Artist, a Colorist, gets zapped, and wham, everything is gray.  It's been six years since I got hit by lightning. I've tried many ways to heal my sense of color, and I have gone through every medium that I had worked in previously in the past, and have found myself back at pencil, at graphite.