If We Were Having Coffee…..

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you this blog just turned a year old! I’m glad WordPress reminds me of these things. I knew it was sometime around now.

If we were having coffee, I’d want you to tell me all about your week. I hope it was a good one with lots accomplished and time for fun. I’m going to need to take a few sips of coffee to warm up my voice before I attempt to speak. Yesterday was the annual university conference where all the various vision research projects get presented. I had a poster to present on one of the studies I am working on. I got to show pictures of the retina and there was a 3D virtual environment involved in the testing procedure. It is definitely one of the cooler research projects I have presented. This is probably why the poster was drawing such big crowds. The talk I gave for the poster was only 5 minutes long, but I had to speak loudly so the crowd could hear me and I had to repeat it nonstop for almost two hours. Now, my voice is all crackly and keeps coming and going.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you that despite the success of the poster and its award nomination, I’m still feeling rather low. I came home from the conference yesterday and just went straight to bed. I don’t know, maybe it is just exhaustion that is getting me down. When Hubby got home he brought in some mail for me. It was a package from my aunt. She sent some stuff that I had left at her place along with some new paint brushes and a new stencil. Very exciting! Check out the stencil..an eye diagram! Awesome! That cheered me up a bit.

If we were having coffee, I’d probably tell you about a friend and a colleague of mine. I am really worried about them. The colleague was supposed to fly in next week to work on that grant proposal with us but he has had to cancel on account of his heart. He has a weak heart and went to the doc thinking he had the flu. It turns out his heart isn’t sounding good, so he has had to cancel the trip and do a full workup. He is not the only one with concerning health problems though. Hubby and I had dinner with our friend Lynne last night. She is scheduled to have her surgery to have her liver metastasis removed in a week and a half. Her latest CT scan shows a new tumor. We are hoping it popped up on the portion they were going to remove anyway.

If we were having coffee, I’d tell you my art class is tomorrow morning. I’m a little nervous. I hope it isn’t too clique-y. I’m also still doing the 30 Day Colouring Challenge from The Daily Marker. There is about a week left. I have been enjoying it. Here is a collection of this week’s stuff. Two of them are from colouring books. The rest I drew myself. I even used regular old crayons this week. It was fun to revisit childhood with a box of nice, sharp, new Crayolas.

If we were having coffee, I’d wish you a good weekend! Hope to see you for coffee next week!

This conversation coffee post is part of a weekly link-up hosted by Part-Time Monster

J52: Just Write

Journal52, Week 11

Prompt: Just Write

I tried multitasking with this one. It is an art journal page for Journal52 and it is my psych homework. I had an appointment with my psychiatrist last Friday. I didn’t mention my declining mood but maybe I should have since it has only gotten worse. I thought it was just the usual up and down at the time. What we did discuss was work. I am having trouble dragging myself through it. I’m not sure if it is work itself, or me being depressed that is the problem. As I was leaving the appointment, Psych said he felt he should give me homework. He asked me to write about work. He wanted me to write what I like about it without thinking about it too much. He didn’t say I had to write it out in my neatest handwriting or anything and considering I hadn’t used this art journal prompt, I figured why not make it into a page.

I’m not really sure what this exercise is supposed to achieve. I don’t deny that there are things I like about my Ph.D., there are just a lot of “but”s. I enjoy learning. If you aren’t learning, you aren’t evolving and if you aren’t evolving, well, you are pretty much dead. I know there are lots of different ways to learn. I just know the academic way of learning and I was good at it, so that’s the route I took.

I also like information. I like to gather it, break it down into small digestible pieces and then build it back up in my own words with my own perspective. I like to share this information with others too. Teaching those that want to learn is always a great experience. I have a bit of stage fright, maybe a lot of stage fright, but giving a talk at a conference can make you feel like a rock star.

I also get to help people, improve their quality of life. Right now, there is no solution for age-related vision loss. There are treatments to help slow the progression, but no cures. The doctors spend as much time with their patients as they can, but some ophthalmologists have to pack 90 patients into one day. They don’t have the time to explain everything. I can do that. I can answer questions and explain how to use various visual aids. We even have training programs that teach people how to use what sight they have left. Most importantly, I can listen. Sometimes, that is all my patients want, someone to listen to them. I can do that.

The reason I started down this path in the first place was because I was interested in vision, aging vision in particular. I was close to my Gran growing up, I even lived with her the first year my family moved to Montreal. Gran had Macular Degeneration (AMD). It got so bad that she was considered legally blind. This meant she wasn’t completely blind, she could still see light and movement, but no details. She walked around with the white cane, listened to audiobooks and was a member of the Canadian National Institute for the Blind (CNIB).

Now, just stop for a second, imagine what it must be like to be a senior citizen, someone who has been depending on their vision for 65+ years and now cannot rely on it at all. You can’t drive, you can’t read, you can’t recognize people, you can’t shop without help because labels, prices and colours are hard to figure out and you can’t do most of your hobbies anymore because trying to see what you’re doing is too frustrating. Just imagine. It is worse when it happens quickly and there is no time to adapt. That is what happened to Gran. Most of the folks I work with get pretty depressed, but not Gran.

Gran was resilient. She had a great attitude. She was determined to stay independent and wasn’t going to let AMD stop her. She still went out on her own. She used her memory to get around the area she lived in. Once, she slipped on some ice and fell, broke her arm. She was out and about, cast and all a few days later. Her love of reading turned into an audiobook subscription. She used tools given to her by the CNIB to continue playing cards and doing cryptic crosswords. Gran even continued knitting! Of course, she could only do the patterns she knew by heart, but added her own little twist to them. These are two of the elephants Gran knitted. An angel and another one with a pink sweater, scarf and beret.

All in all, she lived 15 years with AMD. Gran was a remarkable woman. Her attitude was inspiring. Sadly, I know it’s not like this in all cases. That is what prompted me into this field. I wanted to help in any way that I could. I still do.

By the time I finished my writing, I was in tears. Gran has been gone for 11 years now, but sometimes it feels like it was just yesterday. I guess there are just some losses you never really recover from. I am pretty sure this is not the conclusion Psych wanted me to come to when he assigned me this writing exercise. Perhaps he wanted to determine if I was doing a Ph.D. for the right reasons? I don’t know.

Anyway, this is the page.

For those of you interested in the art part…..I started by drawing a few eyes here and there. I wrote around them with different shades of blue Sharpie. You can see the Sharpie through the back of the page, so make sure you plan to gesso over the back or something. I wrote in different directions with a combination of printing and cursive. I spread a thin layer of gesso over the writing when I finished. I used my old Blockbuster membership card to spread the gesso. I find you can get a thinner layer with the gesso than with a paint brush. I wanted the writing to still be visible. The eyes were coloured with watercolour pencil crayons and Signo Uniball pens. I went over the background with some pastel gelatos. You can see kinda read the writing. It’s a bit tough in some places. I then went through with a Sharpie paint pen and highlighted some key words.

Share Your World 2015 – Week 12

This is Week 12 of Share Your World 2015 from Cee’s Photography. As always, thanks for great questions Cee!

When was the last time you sat on a park or garden bench for more than ten minutes? Describe the occasion.

I can’t remember exactly when, but I am pretty sure I know the “where” part. There is a park Hubby and I like to walk..or run in. It is a rather large park in the next suburb over. It has a pond in the middle a and a trail that goes around it. It is special to us because that is where he took me on our first date. He took me to see the fireflies in the forest there. It was breathtaking. During the summer months, we often go and walk around. If it gets really hot, we’ll sit on one of the benches by the pond and just chat. We did some jogging there last summer, I can’t remember if we walked and sat on a bench though.

Would you ever be interested in observing a surgery or do you turn away when the nurse brings out the needle? 

Both! If it is anything to do with me or someone I know and I get squeamish. If it’s a stranger though, I can handle it. I have always thought seeing an autopsy would be kind of interesting. During undergrad, I taught a systemic anatomy lab to other students. We used human cadavers and human parts. You get past the creepy/gross factor pretty quickly when you have to teach. The one part I never got comfortable with was the sagittal head section. It’s basically a head cut in half right between the eyes. They kept these specimen all together in a bin full of what we referred to as body juice. I’d try to grab one that was floating around with the skull portion above the juice. That part is easier to grab, less fleshy. You never knew though, if you were going to pull it up with the back of the head facing you, or the face side. The face side was always little unnerving, no matter how many times I’d see it.

Where’s your favorite place to take out-of-town guests?

I guess it depends on who the guest is. Some people would really enjoy going to a maple sugar shack which is in season here in Montreal about now, I think. Others, might prefer shopping trendy Montreal designers or seeing the Old Port. I think the one thing I like to do with everyone is go to the little village around the corner from where I live. It is really cute, especially at Christmas or in the summer. Not so much at the current time of year. The buildings are mostly historic ones and there are all kinds of little shops with different things in them. This is an old house that has been turned into a rather fancy restaurant.

The lake is only one street over too. The lake is best seen in the summer with the boats and the wind surfers out, or in the dead of winter, when the lake is frozen and the kite boarders are zipping around. Unfortunately, the kite boarders are done for the year. This is the lake at this time last year. There was less cold and white stuff last winter.

If you had an unlimited shopping spree at only one store, which one would you choose? Why?

Right now, it would have to be a local scrapbook store, Scrapbook Centrale. They carry everything I need for art journaling and drawing. I was there over the weekend and bought a few things; a book on portraits, some paper for art journaling, a spider web stencil, some portrait watercolour pencils and a funky science/steampunk stamp. I could have spent so much more in there!

Bonus question:  What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

Last Week: Last week, I was stressed and my mood was really weird. There is less stress this week, but my mood still isn’t right. I guess I am just thankful last week is over.

This Week: I signed up for an art journal class next weekend at the store I mentioned earlier. I am looking forward to it, but I am also having some social anxiety over it. I’m hoping it will be ok once I get there and get settled.

J52: Artistic Restraint

Journal 52, Week 9

Prompt: Artistic Restraint

This week was hosted by a guest artist and for the first time, there were rules!! The rules were, you could only use one shape and one colour (plus black and white), but you could use any media available to you. My shape was circles. I had just gotten a circle paper punch that I wanted to try out. I chose the colour purple, just because I hadn’t seen anyone else in the group do purple yet.

I drew circles with a stencil and used my punch on paper with different textures. I didn’t have much in the way of purple paper, so most of the circles were punched from neutral paper and coloured. I used purple from every type of media I had, except acrylics (watercolour pencil crayons (regular and metallic), Neocolor II, Crayola Crayons, Sharpies (regular and paint marker)). I outlined the circle with a Fude pen and then went around the circles with black pastel. I smudged the pastel into the background. I intended on leaving some white space, but it ended up smudged with pastel and gelato. I highlighted the circles with white Neocolor and doodled some lines in black and tiny circles in white.

2015AP: Hindsight

This page gets me completely caught up with the 2015 Art Project. For Week 7 there were two options. The first was to do something representing your journey so far and how you are now looking towards the future. The second was to do something about hindsight. I went with the latter. It reminded me of an Irish Proverb I really like…

I drew a girl looking over her shoulder to represent hindsight. It has to do with looking back and understanding an event after it has happened. I used Neocolor II on the girl and outlined her with gel pens. I decided I wanted to use one of my Steampunk gelatos in the background. Gelatos spread a lot better over gesso than over plain paper so I gesso’d around the figure before applying my gelato.

I got a little stuck here. I tried to do border since I hadn’t tried that yet. I used a stencil and a brown Neocolor II crayon. I activated the pigment with water afterwards to smooth it out. It just ended up kind of messy looking. I filled the background using a “Once Upon A Time..” stamp and steampunk stamps; cogs, binoculars and a compass. I did a layer with brown ink to make the background less plain. I did a few of those in black in addition to a few feathers and a butterfly.

At the end, I put some washi tape strips in to occupy empty space. I used some lacy ones and some steampunk ones with cogs and clocks on them.

Here is the whole thing…