Assignment 16: Symmetries

Drawing with both sides of the body & visualizing the brain

Dearest friends,
I’m not usually a big joiner inner on “Official Month of ___,” but March is apparently Brain Injury Awareness Month, and welp—I have a brain injury! So in honor of all of our very special brains, and my own healing journey… today your art assignment is:

SYMMETRIES

You will need:
2 Drawing Utensils
Paper (no digital drawing this time, buckos)

1. First, with eyes closed:

Hold a drawing utensil in each hand.
Take a deep breath and center yourself in the moment. Be in your body.
Mirroring the movement of your hands, begin drawing. This should be automatic—your brain should know what to do with very little guidance from your conscious thought.
Let your hands map out whatever lines, dots, dashes, squiggles, and loops come naturally.
When you feel done, stop.

2. Second, with eyes open:

Begin as you did the previous drawing, but this time with your eyes open. Try to let the drawing emerge from you instead of consciously directing the pen.
When you feel done, stop.

3. Third, imagine what your brain looks like, as if you were seeing it from above.

Begin as you did the previous drawings, but this time, draw your brain. Let each hand map half of the brain, keeping your movements mirrored and not overly controlled.
When you feel done, stop.

With no self criticism or value judgments, only curiosity:

What do you notice about each drawing?
What do you notice about your body after each drawing?
What do you notice about your mind?

Extra Credit:

Try—using different drawing tools in each hand!
Try—using different sizes of paper (from sticky note to the biggest cardboard box you can find and unfold)

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DRAWINGS FOR SALE (ALMOST)

I am slowly working on filling my online shop with the ink drawings that I made at Milkwood Farm this summer. Hopefully launching within the next two weeks. I had to put a lot of work on hold for the brain injury and I’d love to recoup some of those lost wages. No short-term disability leave for freelancers :-| See a preview of about half of the drawings here. Everything will be signed & dated, and likely priced between $80–100. Still very much rationing my daily screen time so it’s a snail’s pace process getting everything ready for a shop launch.

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Beloved Brain III

As I shared in previous posts, I am recovering from a TBI (traumatic brain injury) that I sustained in November 2024. Knock on wood, I think I’m starting to see really heartening shifts for the better the last couple of weeks. Yesterday, I drove myself to the suburbs and back without getting a migraine! After months of my maximum driving distance being about 4 blocks, yesterday’s mundane trip felt like joyous liberation!!! I can’t understate how transcendent driving on I-494 in the middle of a chaotic construction project and getting honked at felt. Sounds like sarcasm but it is not! Watch out world!

Due to the TBI, I’ve spent the last few months very focused on rest, recovery, and trying to understand my brain better. I’ve been trying to strike a balance between scientific research and intuitive self-care, which has brought me to so many wild, cool, exciting threads of inquiry that I imagine I’ll be noodling on for a long time to come.

Throughout the last 4 months, I have not drawn much. At first, it was because I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to anymore. I felt disconnected from my hands for the first several weeks, even though I could write, the handwriting didn’t look like mine. And my eyes were and still are exhausted by focusing on a fixed surface for extended time. So, I was terrified that I might try to draw and discover I’d lost a truly intrinsic part of my identity. After weeks, I forced myself up the stairs and into the studio to draw a single figure, proof that I hadn’t lost it. It was relieving but exhausting.

Weeks later, I started getting an itch to make intuitive/automatic mirrored drawings. I let the itch grow for a couple of days before pulling out my sketchbook to make this drawing:

I made a few more and felt deeply peaceful and grounded.

I knew from my experiences working with EMDR therapy that bilateral stimulation of the body (activating both sides of the body rhythmically) can be a powerful tool in healing emotional trauma, and, I knew that the left and right sides of the brain control the opposite sides of the body. So I thought there might be something at play in mirrored drawing that soothed my nervous system and maybe even helped my brain in its recovery.¹

This question led me to the concept of Bilateral Drawing, and the art therapy research and work of Cathy Malchiodi and Cornelia Elbrecht, giving me a strong sense that my hunch has merit!

At the same time, I’d also asked my partner to check out a couple books about brains from the very tiny neurology section of the library at the art school where he teaches. I was especially intrigued by the history of visually mapping the brain.

View of a human brain from below. Thomas Willis and Christopher Wren, 1664. Image: Courtesy of Wellcome Library (London); catalog number L0032335.

Santiago Ramón y Cajal, The pyramidal neuron of the cerebral cortex, 1904. Ink and pencil on paper, 8 5/8 x 6 7/8 in. Cajal Institute (CSIC), Madrid

Folks! A drawing a of a NEURON! What! It’s so beautiful!

I’ll leave you with one more bit of delight, which is the result of pinterest seeing my searches for brain imagery and giving me instead… choreography.

Dances in Beauchamp-Feuillet Notation (1701)

So of course now I want to work with a choreographer to make my brain drawings into dances.

Hopefully things continue trending positively for me, and I’ll be able to write to you again soon.

In the meantime, THANK YOU for being here. Please write if you have questions, thoughts, drawings to share, etc. etc. I love hearing from you.

xo, Sara

1. Gut feeling! Neuroscientists, if you’re out there, I want to talk to you!