Patti Edmon Artist

Invisible Illness (Awareness) Week  has begun! In keeping with the theme, another of my choices is to be my best possible self. And that includes reaching out, sharing, caring, helping when I can... all qualities of being a good friend. There's an old saying, to make a friend you first have to be one. True, but. Sometimes those of us with chronic illness get overlooked, passed by as though not being able to  able make the party means we don't need to get an invitation.  The text I used in this piece of art, called Thoughts on Friendship, is an excerpt from a friendship 'manifesto' I wrote several years ago, after experiencing what I call being tossed from the merry-go-round. When life as I knew it ended and, unlike those with visible injuries and acute illnesses (especially cancer - God forbid), the carousel kept right on turning without me. Don't get me wrong, my family has always been really supportive and I do have good friends. But there were a coup...

The theme of this year's National Chronic Invisible Illness Week is "I Choose To" and one of my choices is to always be emerging from the cocoon, seeking the new and extraordinary, finding and using wings that had been dormant, not settling for a life spent crawling. Well, not all the time. I wake up and wait to see how I'm going to feel for the day and more often than not it's so-so, meaning, no errands, social events or major chores. So, I choose to go to the studio, put on my headphones and blast my fight songs - Rage Against the Machine, Led Zeppelin, Three Days' Grace, Rolling Stones, Tool, well, you get the idea. And then I  gesso a page,  prepare for takeoff... I most always start out with a layer of texture - paper, trim, stuff that will give my page depth. By then I usually have a photograph in mind and I choose a color palette. Hopefully with one or two colors I haven't used recently. That's when I reach high altitude. Paint o...

Heading to Saluda tomorrow - one my most favorite home away from homes! The workshop will be fun and amazing (and surprising, I hope, considering I don't do faces:) and I so look forward to the company of other artists, along with the fabulous Jane Powell , proprietress of all things cool, funky, creative and unusual! This piece is another in the series of watercolor pages I've done incorporating my photos - the options are proving to be endless, thankfully! Can't wait to try some new techniques - always a treat. Stay tuned for Invisible Illness Week !! Until then, what's on your table?

Next Week is National Invisible Illness Week - so along with posting another Frozen Charlotte piece that is part of the Seeking Sanctuary series, I wanted to address life with chronic illness, as I do every September.  I have read that it's not good to mix messages on a blog, that the content should be consistent, i.e., I have an altered art blog, so I should post altered art. However, the art wouldn't have happened without the illness and it a big factor in who I am... so, I'll understand if you stop reading! The placement of the accent is the only difference between ‘in-val-id and its heteronym in-‘val-id. I don’t consider myself an invalid or invalid; however, both are quite apt descriptions for the initial years, those spent gathering pieces of a life scattered after a diagnosis that, while thankfully not terminal, in many ways has been interminable. Those hazy, first years of ending one way of life and grappling to ass...

A big challenge when blogging about National Invisible Illness Week is avoiding rerun mode when discussing life with chronic illness. As in, wow, I was going to post every other day but suddenly it's Thursday! Oh well, a crazy barometer and the crazier schedules of the mom-taxi passengers, and so on... I decided to focus instead on a couple of CI folks who chose to contribute to the positivity flowing in cyber world. The first is Michael Nobbs , a British artist, writer and tea drinker diagnosed in the late 1990s with ME/CFS/PVFS (otherwise known as Myalgic Encephalopathy/Chronic Fatigue Syndrome/Post Viral Fatigue Syndrome). The debilitating fatigue that derails many a creative endeavor is Michael's daily existence; his philosophy, however, is about sustaining creativity in blocks of time based on available energy. He counsels that devoting even fragments of time to one's art leads to a collective body of work. He focuses on prioritizing, or as he says in his fr...

Though the national Invisible Illness Week doesn't officially launch until September 12th, I decided to post today because, well, I'm having a flare, probably like half the population. Yes, it's a stat; nearly 50% of us suffer from a chronic condition. It is very difficult to remain still when my dreams are so alive and energized. And when there are dirty dishes, laundry and chores that seem higher on the priority list than working in the studio, though usually not! The IIW website is a wealth of information for those of us dealing with the myriad conditions that may go unnoticed, unless of course you happen to play tennis like Venus Williams (Sjogren's Syndrome) or golf like Phil Mickelson (Psoriatic Arthritis - both just like me!). In one of my favorite articles , founder Lisa Copen writes about the fact that living with illness doesn't mean choosing giving in! Next week I'll be writing more about this year's theme, Deep Breath, Fresh Start, the modus...

Here we are, September 19th, the last day of National Invisible Illness Week. I end the week filled with joy at the comments to my posts, the messages from friends and the dialog that I hope will continue until next September. I have learned so much from reading the blog posts of others. Lani Gerity Glanville , mentor, friend, moderator of online art group I am proud to belong to, read my post and wrote an amazingly powerful piece. An Art Therapist, Lanie has a wealth of experience and uses her incredible creative talents to live, learn, share and teach. She has continued the conversation by delving a little deeper into resilience, one of her favorite topics. Well worth reading. Also, a post by a young, too young, gal who has Lyme's Disease (and a host of others) but who uses her illness to spread good. Victoria is her name and I was heartened by her words. The bottom line is, for every person dealing with an Invisible Chronic Illness, there are countless others invol...

Here it is Friday and my goal was to post every other day during the National Invisible Illness Week. So much to say... about what it causes my family, especially my husband to endure, the guilt that flickers in my brain at the drop of a piece of laundry - that I can't wash at the moment, the lack of social life... If not for art and writing, I think I would be, well, a mess. I did have a few hours this past week, after having been in a major flare for nearly two months, of self pity. Or, is it grief? When something of value ends, be it a life, dream, career, there is a natural cycle of denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance (Kubler-Ross model). But when it doesn't end once but loss is felt over and over again? Though not in order, I do reruns now and again. It is autumn, a season I love but one that, second only to spring, triggers more flares with each dip of the barometric roller coaster. And, since Medicare doesn't pay for my meds, to the tune of $...