Zen drawing after a stroke
October 24, 2020
Early 2016 my then 65 year old father got a series of brain attacks that affected his live tremendously. His left brain got damaged in 7 different areas and he had failure symptoms on his right side of the body, making him unable to walk or use his hand and right arm. Besides this, his memory failed, he could not read or write, and his sight was highly affected due to Hemianopsia. As a daughter and psychologist, it gave me a profound insight in the functioning of my father's brain: he could spell words, but was unable to read them. He could write letters in the air with his finger, but he could not recognize letters when he saw them on paper. He could describe animals, but he didn't recognize them on pictures. It was my father's worst nightmare since he loved to walk in nature and read a book. Basically, the world as he knew it fell apart and he had to rebuild his life all over again.
Luckily for me and my family, he received great care in a rehabilitation center and made great progress in a short period of time. He slowly learned how to walk and he began to recognize written words and animals again. Besides that he had to learn how to write all over again.
After a few weeks he started to get some control back over his right arm so I decided to see if Zen drawing might be a good exercise for him to stimulate his vision, memory, concentration span and fine motorskills. Now to be honest my father isn't the 'drawing kind', so when I asked him to draw a stork -one of his favorite birds- shortly after his stroke, this was the drawing he made...
Based on this drawing my expectations weren't very high when we started to practice several weeks later. I had to help him get a grip on his pencil and sometimes it just flew out of his hands like a slippery piece of soap. I started asking him to draw straight lines and symbols from memory. That actually went very well so I asked him to draw a stork again -see the picture below- one from memory (top of the paper) and one from a photo (bottom of the paper). As you can see, they were almost similar and much better than the drawing in red pen he made weeks earlier (picture above).
One of the exercises in Zen drawing is called 'blind contour drawing' so I decided to start practicing this with my father. When I asked him to draw the leaf a Ginkgo tree I noticed that it was much easier for him to draw the left side of the leaf than it was drawing the right side of that same leaf. It may have had something to do with the motor skills of his arm at that time, but when asked him to draw the same stork he drew earlier from the photo again but this time using the blind contour drawing technique, the result -as you can see in the image below- surprised us both!
My father got really enthusiastic, so I asked to draw his favorite bird: the kingfisher (below left) and after this drawing went really really well. He also drew a spoonbill and wrote down the name of the bird in Dutch (lepelaar, below right) and this is when I noticed that his writing had also improved as a result of practicing with his drawing. In the end I had to make him stop drawing and take some rest. Zen drawing became one of the exercises that gave him a positive experience of success in his recovery.
Now, several years after this intense period I can happily say that my father has recovered quite well from his stroke. He is able to walk, read and write again and although he sometimes gets confused or tired and still has the visual impairment, I can say that he is doing better than we ever could have hoped for. If you are wondering if he is still drawing, the honest answer is.....No!
Since his recovery he prefers reading over drawing, but the only thing he now claims, is that my talent actually comes from him...