I started drawing dots 4 years ago, it was a kind of therapy, at the time it was the only form of art I could do. I had broken my arm in quite spectacular fashion at my job, and gained a year of physical therapy and multiple doctors telling me my career was over for my efforts. So dots were good, dots were small, dots I could pick up and put down and work for 5 minutes at a time… dots were really all I had left of 7 years of education and a career that had taken me around the world. But the world doesn’t stop just because you do, I figured that the dots would go away as I got stronger, but then I had a baby. I became a mum and the love for my new family meant my career faded just a little more into a wonderful kaleidoscope of memories. The dots became something else, a small space were I could still create, I filled in the time around changing diapers and feedings with tiny marks, the action of putting pen to paper no matter how small keeping alive the part of me I almost lost.
So here I am now, 4 years later, still making dots. I had a discussion with an artist friend recently on why I still create dots, why I have never gone back to the enormous brush strokes of scenic artistry, the world I was so familiar with. She replied quite simply, you know why,
You are creating control within chaos.
She was so very right.
elephant, my first dot picture, 2013