Bringing Emotions
to Canvas

Post Traumatic Art

On a day that ended in horror, I sprang out of bed in my studio apartment and worked on a pencil drawing. I felt pure joy drawing and painting after a decade of seeing my creativity thwarted by trauma: mind, body and spiritual burnout from a systems engineering and management career, death of loved ones, the heart-crushing realization that my husband of 28 years loved me not. I sang while I drew, envisioning painting the landscape depicted in the drawing in oil or watercolor, exploring abstracted realism, and learning to create posters in Adobe Photoshop.

At 7:10 p.m. on January 21, 2020, I stepped into a marked crosswalk and felt agonizing pain in my back and wooziness in my head as a gigantic SUV slammed into me. As the truck dragged me an estimated 20 feet, I begged, stop, please stop. I can’t die now. My creativity just began.” I was 60 years old.

This new trauma was just beginning. When covid hit a month later, my doctors and therapists cancelled appointments for injuries from brain to toe. A year and a half after the accident, my son and only child died in a house fire.