The Art Escape

“Draw Antonio, draw Antonio, draw, and do not waste time!” ~ Michelangelo, note to a wayward student.

I try to carry my sketchbook with me whenever I go out. This is not something I do to make life easier. It means keeping track of the sketchbook, and at least one pen while doing the grocery shopping, eating with friends or running errands. I’ve set down numerous half-filled sketchbooks meaning to pick them up later, only to forget and never retrieve them. Why do I complicate my life this way? Isn’t Parkinson’s disease enough of a distraction? 

Actually, Parkinson’s Disease is one of my main reasons for doing it. PD is one long, slow slide into entropy, the process of disorganization where all things decline into randomness over time. Drawing can reverse this seemingly inexorable process in one area at least for a while. 

How can this be? Doesn’t the second law of thermodynamics decree that all things become more random over time? 

Yes, and as a law-abiding citizen of this universe, I cannot defy this. But I can look for loopholes. Drawing is one of them. If you draw a little every day, you will get better at it, Parkinson’s or not. And if you really go to town with it and draw “Ten times more than anybody you know” according to the noted caricaturist Philip Burke, you will become better than you could have dreamed. With Parkinson’s we tend to dwell on what is deteriorating. Drawing is an activity where we go from worse to better. It’s a reversal of the normal flow of events you experience when you are dealing with PD.

Even as my sight gets weaker, when I am disciplined about sketching, my ability to analyze what I see and to organize visual phenomena grows. My pen strokes become surer. With more experience analyzing visual problems, my solutions become more natural and effective. I can’t improve my vision, in fact, it gets worse, but I see better. 

The fact that I can do something better over time reverses both the second law of thermodynamics, and the first law of Parkinson’s, that entropy increases over time. And the more I practice, the more entropy is reversed.

Parkinson’s is a degeneration into an entropic state. As the brain falters due to the increased damage from the assault from clumps of misfolded proteins, the ability to focus gets disrupted. Like a universe growing cold, your ability to function becomes impaired. But I have seen my drawing ability increase in spite of these formidable obstacles. It’s a small victory over PD, but with a chronic illness where victories are few and hard to come by, it is significant.

My drawing will not always improve. There will come a time when the second law of thermodynamics is strictly enforced, and I will no longer be able to find loopholes that allow the moments of reprieve now granted me. But to snatch back some time from Parkinson’s and use that time to create art is a terrific way to defy a miserable disease.

So, the next time you see someone sketching somewhere, give them a friendly nod and a thumbs up. Better yet, get out the sketchbook you carry with you everywhere and join them. They may look like they are only doodling. But what they are actually up to is a tiny rebellion against the randomness of the Universe. They are imposing order on their little corner of the Space-Time Continuum. It’s a big job, turning chaos into art, but just because you have PD doesn’t mean you have to sit on the sidelines. Just the opposite. Pick up a pencil and begin.    

Above, a recent portrait from my sketchbook of a diner in a restaurant.

by Peter Dunlap-Shohl
NW Parkinson’s Blogger and Person with Parkinson’s

“It is the work of the creative to be a prosthetic imagination for the distracted and the dull”
– Maxwell Hubert Maxwell, playwright, butterfly collector, amateur surgeon and snob.