Strange New Color World

The doctor told me that my newly acquired peculiar color vision in my left eye was nothing to worry about - just a difference due to the surgical implant I had following cataract surgery. My last blog entry related how I was trying to adjust to the new color world of pink bananas, grey grass, blue peas, and not seeing what I was trying to paint any longer.

I decided not long after my post that I had had enough of attempting to paint with a patch over the offending eye, trying to eat spaghetti with a sauce that looks like raspberry sorbet, seeing awful colors on my favorite clothes, and harvesting flowers that looked grey instead of purple and peach instead of yellow. The painting problem had been especially disconcerting because it had crept into stereoscopic vision as well. The painting I made at right with both eyes open I thought had a light blue background.

So I called the manufacturer of the artificial lens and gave them a report of the problem. My patience having run out, instead of attempting to legitimize what I was now seeing, I spilled out a whining concatenation of how terrible their new lens was vis a vis my quality of life with regard to eating food with unappetizing colors and not being able to see what I’m painting....and I want it out! According to the manufacturer, the color distortion that I was describing was way out of bounds for what was normal for their lens. That prompted me to examine the situation again. After researching color blindness on the net I discovered the reason why the doctor told me I had "normal" vision. I was given a test for red green color blindness and my problem was yellow blue. Needless to say, at the time I pointed to the yellow trash can that I could still see out of my right eye and let the eye doctor know that out of my left eye the trash can was white. He was unmoved and I was again reassured that the filter in my implanted lens was the culprit.

I did some unscientific, albeit helpful tests to further isolate the problem. I created an online gallery of yellow objects on Etsy and posted it in a treasury entitled "Sweet Sweet Yellow Goodbye." I wrote a caption explaining that after surgery all the pictured objects look white, peach, and pink. I went on to say that the doctor said this was normal. Is that true? I queried. I expected the display to go viral, with a resounding "Nay" from the internet world. What in fact panned out was that only seven people even looked at the gallery of yellows, two of them writing a note thanking me for including their work among such pretty things. Clearly my ability to create a message left something to be desired.

On to plan B. I selected a picture of a glass vase that was described as yellow and green from my Etsy list of yellow things. I cut and pasted this onto to an e-mail and sent it to people who had correct vision and as well to others whose vision had been corrected by cataract surgery. I told them I saw a vase that was very light blue and trimmed with very light champagne pink. As I suspected, even those with implanted lenses after cataract surgery saw green and yellow.

"Aha!" I said to myself. My first inclination was to take my findings back to the doctor who tried to convince me that it was perfectly normal for an inter ocular lens implant to wipe green and yellow right off the visual map and exclaim, "Liar, liar, pants on fire!"

Instead I thought I might contact an eye doctor with greater cosmopolitan flair and erudition with my problem. He agreed that the lens was most likely not the problem and gave me a short list of medical tests to do. He also made mention of a peculiar illness that often follows a neurological episode and causes color distortions that range from seeing the wrong colors to seeing the world with no color at all.

It was hard for me to imagine a world that looks like the Wizard of Oz film before Dorothy opens that door to Munchkin land. But yesterday, when broad daylight over my blue, red and yellow flannel shirt turned it to gray and white I could imagine it. What would one do if the living world became black and white? Would I still dream in color? I vowed that should such a fate befall me I would become an even more avid consumer of classic black and white films than I am now and spend my days working on black and white drawings.

In the mean time, I’m giving my patched eye a break and making monoprints in black with limited color palettes painted back in to them, nestling in to the safety of gray tones.

  I had thought this monoprint was abstract.  Turning it upright I see that it is a cat.  It looks like my theme of cats in paintings and illustrations is not quite over.

A Division of Color in the Post Cataract World

I recently had a cataract removed and an intraocular lens implanted. I took it as something of a minor miracle of science that the vision in my left eye could be restored in such a way. The only trouble with the implant was that I noticed a dramatic change in color vision, unfortunately not in a good way. Green pine trees now looked a dull greyish blue. Light yellow turned to white. Blue in the ultramarine range turned to teal. Golden yellow turned to pink. To make matters even more disconcerting, I would sometimes see a split color field...normal out of my natural eye on the right and unusual on the left. Looking at a golden oak door, for instance, gave a split image: golden on the right side and red on the left. The door looked like it was made from oak on the right and from cedar on the left. Several weeks went by. A month went by. The colors stayed the same.

To add to the craziness of this new split color vision, I was told that I was the only one who experienced this kind of color distortion. A recent test for color blindness determined that I was not color blind in my left eye. I wondered about that. As an artist I have always been not only sensitive to colors but to tonality as well. Therefore, on a color blindness test, although the colors were muted and grey with my left eye, I could still detect forms because they were slightly lighter than the background dot pattern. I remember my color blind brothers being able to decipher forms that way by concentrating on the tonality.

When I told the doctor who examined me that I cannot see yellows, greens or blues accurately, he explained that my intraocular lens had both blue and yellow light filters in it which would change color perception. That may explain why the world suddenly changed with what must be a permanently implanted pair of sunglasses in my eye. The doctor assured me that some years down the road, when I get my right eye "fixed" everything will look the same, so not to worry. I imagined a world where daffodils look pink, spaghetti sauce looks like raspberry sorbet and green grass is slate blue grass - out of both eyes instead of just one. It was not exactly comforting.

Something a painting conservator told me came back to be in my current pink daffodil world. He once said to beware of painting techniques, media, and pigments designed by scientists rather than artists. He said that painting restoration was best left to people with art training who are sensitive to colors and understand the use of paint. The painting formulas and media invented by chemists don’t really work on a practical use basis, he told me. I understand this better now with regard to the new intraocular lenses. The scientists who designed the ones with yellow and blue light filters did so as a means of protecting the eye against UV light and hence, macular degeneration. (The jury may still be out on whether or not they really afford the patient the professed protection). On a practical basis, the resulting vision appears thus far to be tantamount to looking through sunglasses - functional but not exactly pretty. So science had in mind people whose livelihood and/or quality of life does not depend on accurately discerning colors - and that would be most people - design for function but not finesse.

For a painter, it is a loss, and rather disconcerting to see a different hue out of each eye -an annoyance that would be perhaps like what a musician might experience if he heard a different pitch out of each ear! But to be camp about it, the lens was a replacement part. And as I age there are likely to be mounting replacement parts. And despite the best endeavors of science and medical breakthroughs, a replacement part is never the same as what nature gave us. Considering the alternatives, functional is good enough for now.

as I used to know it in my left eye.

The painting of the daffodils above was painted purposely yellow on the right and slightly pink on the left, to reflect the new world. When looking up different types of color vision, I came across a web site which depicts how people see a yellow flower and how a butterfly sees it. The top photograph depicted a yellow flower. The "butterfly eye" photograph below that showed a flower that was slightly pinkish purple. I closed my right eye and looked at the two photographs with my artificial lens eye. They were both identical to the bottom version. So the mystery has been solved. I have been given a butterfly’s eye. Makes me think of Zhuang-zi’s butterfly dream.

The Dance of the Gar Fish at SCSU

South Carolina State University has seen troubles. But this February the state legislature upped the anti by voting to close the institution for two years, opening again only if its fiscal house is ordered. My own personal reaction to this was to first wonder at the timing of this pronouncement in Black History Month. Coincidence? Or just bad manners?

For now, the enforced closing appears to be on hold in the face of administrative shake-ups. I do hope that SCSU will be able, somehow, to get its fiscal house in order. There is much about the university that is worth preserving. The I.P. Stanback Museum, the theatre, music and arts departments come to mind first, albeit on account of my artist’s bias. There are great holdings of African and African American art at the Stanback. The music department does incredible work, with graduates often moving on to international careers in performance. The best dance performance I ever saw, and I’ve been around the world, was at South Carolina State University.

Some of the dancers I knew some years ago at South Carolina State University posed for me when I was creating a visual arts project involving the gar fish. The recent debacle with SCSU’s precarious fiscal position made me think of those dancers once again. I wanted to post a drawing or two of them. I searched my archive, however, and only found photographs and a previously posted ceramic piece. So conjured up a new drawing based upon my photographs. An original photo is at right.

Won’t a Deus Ex Machina, a Sugar Daddy, or a Sugar Mother arrive on the scene and help set things right for this beleaguered university? Creative ingenuity needs to continue to grow and thrive.

An Experimental Udu Drum

The wild purple clay from Congaree, South Carolina yielded some unexpected results. I had expected the purple clay to fire dark - almost black. I suppose I expected a dark color because the purple clay in its raw state reminded me of the dark purple yixing teapots from China. But what emerged from the bisque firing was a light pink color. This can be seen at the base of the vessel above. The top part of this vessel was painted with pink and blue terra sigillata. I then brushed some iron oxide on it to see how what effect that would have. Ordinarily I would smoke fire the vessel in a pit fire but I decided to leave this unsmoked due to the fragility of the glaze, which was delaminating in parts. To save this work, I sanded down the parts where the glaze puckered and buffed the whole surface with a microcrystalline wax.

This was an experimental vessel in many ways. The clay was a new and unknown entitity. Harvested straight from the ground, its composition was a mystery. I used a painting terra sigillata with some old underglaze colors, not knowing what the effect would be. The shape of the vessel was a departure from my usual symmetry in making functional musical instruments from clay. This vessel was fashioned as an udu drum. I purposely made the form lopsided to see if that would affect the sound. It did not. It sounded the same as my symmetrical vessels. I was pleased with the off-center form though.

A Figure and a Lee Bontecou Collage

For the last three days, I have been working on one of my slow, detailed pencil drawings. The original sketch was from a model dating way back to graduate school at Parsons School of Design. Like most of my sketches from that time, the composition was spare. The figure rested in front of a blank square on the wall. It was originally a backdrop that consisted of a wild and wooly painting by one of my classmates. In other drawings from that time, I sketched in the painting - a strange imaginary scene replete with floating figures and mythical horned beasts.

Time has made the memory of my reasons for leaving the painting out fuzzy. In looking at the sketch again, the blank space behind the figure beckoned for content. For this content I chose to pencil in a mixed media collage by the artist Lee Bontecou. Lee Bontecou’s collage of canvas and metal dates from 1961. I chanced upon it when I rediscovered an anthology of American Women Artists by Charlotte Streifer Rubinstein. At the book’s publication in 1982 the collage was in the Whitney Museum and I suppose it is still there.

In most of my new drawings from old sketches, I include an homage to another art work in the composition. I have used primitive art, folk art, old master paintings, and even some of my own art work. I chose a women artist from the 1960's this time because I realized that I had not used the work of women artists much and decided to remedy the situation. The 1961 art work is there on account of a memory I had of the man who posed for the painting. He liked to watch old films, in particular films from the early sixties. The model was especially fond of the 1963 film, Bye Bye Birdie.

My choice of the art of Lee Bontecou was apt, for I felt that there was a evolution in her art from relief sculpture to drawing that I could relate to, as it paralleled my own development in recent years. Bontecou was a star of the 1960's who selected, or perhaps was consigned to, a quieter life for the next few decades before bursting on the scene again in the 21^st century with a retropective at the Smithsonian in 2004 http://www.smithsonianmag.com/ist/?next=/arts-culture/lee-bontecous-brave-new-world-180940 I like the ovoid shapes in Bontecou’s work. They seem to serve both as solid egg-like structures as well as voids. The saw blade that she incorporated in her "Untitled" work from 1961 that serves as the backdrop in my drawing adds a disarming note of aggression.

In a final stroke of kitsch in juxtaposition with serious art, I added a small heart by the model’s left side. After all, Valentine’s day will soon be upon us.

A Buckle in Beemerville

My most recently revised drawing came from a sketch made several years ago in Beemerville, New Jersey. The man in the sketch is Leland Bell. I sketched him first at an outdoor picnic table,leaning over a radio/tape player. He was listening to a piece of jazz music, tapping out the beats with his right hand.

After listening to his music, Leland rested by the side of a small outbuilding. I drew him again in that spot, recording the two poses on the same page - dual aspects of Leland Bell. Leland was very ill at the time and it was impressive that he made the trip out to New Jersey to be with his graduate art students.

In order to finish this composition, I darkened the foreground and extended lines throughout to tie the elements together. This tying together in the final drawing reminds me of an observation of my husband’s about certain historical works of art. He coined the word, "buckling" for the technique of unifying a composition by attaching the lines that create the spaces and forms at various junctures like a buckle on a shoe.  In two areas, Leland is the buckle.

A Lens Distorted

Once again, I am turning to old sketches to turn into new drawings. How is that for alliteration?

The drawing above was completed in charcoal and pastels over an original pencil sketch. I believe that the model’s name was Francesca and she purposely wore these long black stockings and struck and pose reminiscent of Toulouse Lautrec or Degas.

The original pencil sketch had no background so I created one that was like a view through a distorted lens. I had been reading about lens implants so this may have had a subliminal influence. I was advised to find out more about the makings of lens implants before getting one on account of my numerous chemical allergies. Thus far they look okay - mostly made of silicone and plastics.

Artificial lenses, although great for restoring eyesight, aren’t the same as the eye’s natural lens in that they only provide focus at one distance and the cataract patient is then obliged to wear glasses for close-up work and reading. What I found fascinating, however, was that in 2013 a new lens was patented that focuses in three ranges - more like a natural eye lens. This is something that might be worth asking about, although on account of my far-sightedness in my right eye that may or may not work. The new multifocal and accommodating intraocular lenses (IOLS) are patented under the trade name Cystalens and Trulign. When I call the companies about materials used I may inquire about these as well.

The Cat with TMJ

I have been working on my sculptures, musical instruments and pottery using my found purple clay. These objects will take a long time to process before they are ready to photograph and include on a blog or web site. In between drying times I am working on small charcoal drawings and illustrations - always nice to do things that give immediate results. The latest completed illustration is a pathetic little illustration for my rhyme about a cat with TMJ. I was recently diagnosed with this and can now add that to the growing list of difficult to treat conditions. Fortunately TMJ can be treated with physical therapy and a brace - it does do some good.

The Cat with TMJ is part of my new collection of rhymes, "A Book of Hapless Cats." His rhyme:

When he eats a mouse, without fail
his jaw will lock if he chews the tail
Munch the bones and he’ll have to pay
That hapless cat with TMJ

He is careful not to yawn too wide
or move his mouth from side to side
He sits slack jawed to keep pain at bay
That poor little kitty with TMJ

He would like to meow at the moon at night
But it would probably cost him a jaw locked tight
So he sits mute towards the end of the day
wishing that he was not a cat with TMJ
copyright 2014 Janet Kozachek

The Cat in Cataract

I have decided to self publish The Book of Marvelous Cats. This is my way of coming to terms with the fact that I need to move the work out there for friends, family, and the larger public if possible, and must do so by relying on professional services than my own hit or miss process. I haven’t committed to a service yet but have at least decided on a publishing method.

In the mean time, I am at work on a second volume, The Book of Hapless Cats. Thus far, these have been illustrated with quick charcoal drawings for speed and ease of execution. My second illustration in this series is for the Cat Aract. I had originally intended to make this drawing using only my blind eye but found that I am now so blind in that eye I would only be making an amorphous blob. Instead I compromised by peaking with my good right eye in order to make a cat form more discernable. But anyone viewing the Cat Aract will get the general idea of diminished vision. The blurred lettering in the background of this drawing is what even the largest "E" on an eye chart now looks like.

Allergy Cat

In recent blogs I addressed the issue of how to deal with a growing list of allergens that most likely were contributing to my woeful health. My list of chemical allergens and their alternate names/forms were overwhelming. A veritable laundry list of polysyllabic names was handed to me. I wondered if I should just slowly memorize the list as if it were an epic poem. To that end I started writing a poem about a cat with allergies, including some of the names on my long list. To illustrate the text, instead of using detailed pencil drawing as I did in my Book of Marvelous Cats", I made a sketch in charcoals and pastels in my quick and gestural style. The cat wears a dust mask and Apretec barrier socks. I suppose it is a self portrait of sorts.

The poem goes like this:

Allergy Cat

Allergy Cat’s snout swells out from fleas
But all his flea powders just make him sneeze
When he eats canned cat food he starts to wheeze
Diphenylguanidine in his catnip makes him heave

Dried cat food preserved with methylparaben
is Allergy Cat’s most volatile allergen
But the soap in his bath that he really does hate
is the one made with butyl-p-hydroxybenzoate

Allergy Cat improves in a pesticide free sweater
On a mite free cushion he does even better
His paws turn red from untreated wood
Hypoallergenic cotton booties do him some good

The sniffling kitty cannot abide
Kitty crackers with parthelinomide
When other cats come in wearing strong perfume
Allergy Cat will up and leave the room

Allergy Cat gets a rash from his collar
-the cheap used one he picked up for a dollar
So he reached into his pockets and pulled out some green
and purchased a new one made of polypropylene

His friends advise Allergy Cat not to be so neurotic
and to sit among flowers both colorful and exotic
Allergy Cat replies "I beg your pardon...
but I can’t swish my tail in a pesticide garden"

And thus begins the new "Book of Hapless Cats"