Diabetes Art Day 2012 - Self Portrait

This is my first Diabetes Art Day and I’m pretty excited to be participating!  I’m also excited to check out everyone else’s contributions!

For an explanation of Diabetes Art Day, and the creative mind behind it (the lovely Lee Ann Thill), as well as all the submissions (past and present), you can find the D.A.D. website here.

I meant to make my submission long before today, but had been having trouble wrapping my mind around exactly what I wanted to do.  This morning I woke up with another retinal bleed in my left eye – not a big nasty one with the icky opaque blobbies, but an eyeball full of red streaks that was icky nonetheless.  The mess in my eye gave some clarity to my art project.

When people ask me what it’s like to have a retinal bleed, I ask them to think back to an art project they may have done in grade school.  The one where you get a piece of paper, a straw, and a blob of paint, and you blow through the straw and watch the paint wiggle and streak around the page until you have a stringy, goopy, spidery masterpiece.  That’s kind of what an eye bleed looks like.  They can also come in large opaque blotches, or in translucent mists, but this straw-blown paint type is what I’ve grown most accustomed to.

So, looking at myself in the mirror this morning, with my left eye all stringy, I determined exactly what my art project would be.  It’s more of a downer than I initially wanted to submit, but it’s what I needed to create today.  Here it is:

Self Portrait

** Edit:  I realized I didn’t fully explain my media above.  I used a photograph of myself (that I took) and my daughter’s tempera paint…with the straw-blowing method described above. 

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