Limited Art Making

  Stemming off of an exercise we did in our Digital Visual Cultures class, to understand the perspective of making art with a physical limitation, I created water color and pen drawings with only my right hand, which I taped up to only give me access to one finger (ring).
  The art that I make, to me, relates a lot to topography and the feeling of maps. I really am in love with the idea of things and places connecting, and making those connections myself, so that is what I try to make my art about. I enjoy using micron pens because of their variety of sizes, I can get a variation of lines within each other, that also do not bleed into the water color.

  So, I tried my best to create art using these same ideas that I include in my own art. There were many aspects that made it very difficult and different in comparison to using two, fully capable hands. But before the actual art making, the setting up and preparation were also much different. Only using one hand (one limited hand), things like filling up a cup, controlling the sink, opening and closing pens were more mentally taxing. You had to be very aware of how you were going to do the action, instead of just knowing what and how you were going to do it without thinking. Using my mouth for things such as opening and closing pens was really helpful, because it was like holding one end with my hand and pulling with my other. When holding the pen, it also was helpful to also hold the cap within the bend of my finger as it filled up the space more and was more secure in my hand. 

One of the most difficult parts of the actual making was that I could not hold the pen in different ways to create smaller marks using my fingers. It was more about the movement of my hand/arm rather than smaller movements. At first this was frustrating but it was interesting to discover new ways to create the same effects. I tried to not stop moving my arm and to keep making line as this kept marks looking a lot cleaner, and made for interesting places in the drawing. The end product was definitely not as refined and clean as what I usually do, but still pretty interesting to look at actually! 

When looking up close you can see how the marks made are definitely a little "messy", but I really enjoy what I made with my limitation. This definitely made me realize how much differently I would think about my art making as an artist if I truly did have this, or another physical limitation. It was interesting and frustrating to find ways to overcome what is frustrating you- especially when you're used to working in another very specific way. 

Cleaning up these materials was not that difficult, actually. The brush, being small, with a few good spins in a water cup was clean, and the water just needed to be dumped down the drain. The watercolor container was a little tricky but the only real difficult part was making sure the cap was snapped on. And the pen caps, when simply on the pen were made securely closed by banging it a little harder on a table surface. 

All in all, this was a really interesting experience and made me consider not only how lucky I am to be an artist without physical limitations such as this, but also has me thinking about the way I go about making art.