Tag Archives: heart

Eight Years Overcoming

Posted on by under Art, Life

Eight years ago today one of the few most significant pivots of my life happened. My cardiac arrest is intimately tied to the death of my sister, to my experience of my home town, to my understanding of life and spirituality, and to my way of moving through every day life.

This year I’m commemorating the traumaversary with a new version of an old work. I first created Situation and Circumstance Overcome in 2003. It is definitely my most successful and most owned work, as I’ve created many copies – both paintings and prints – of the work as fundraisers for adoptions and other charitable occasions. For this version I chose to use my AxiDraw X&Y plotter. Using a new print of my old mezzotint plate of the piece (fig. 1) as a visual source, I created a large vectored image in Inkscape that had roughly 30 layers printed upwards of 5 times each (fig. 2).

Fig. 1: Situation and Circumstance Overcome.
Mezzotint print on paper. 16×20 inches. 2023.

Ink the vectored image you can see many of the layers along with the direction of the hatch fills and choices I made for density of pigment load. Each color was created with Sharpies, Posca acrylic markers, and a few other ink-based markers. The layers shown in the Inkscape file don’t correspond fully to the final image (fig 3.) because I made adjustments/changes to individual layers as I moved through building the image. There is a call and response between the digital and physical realms here that I really appreciate. I’ve also included a few details of the piece so you can see the finer textures and lines.

Fig. 2: Situation and Circumstance Overcome (Inkscape layers version).
SVG file. 2024.
Fig. 3: Situation and Circumstance Overcome (’24 Traumaversary Version).
Ink and acrylic on Arches paper. 16×20 inches. 2024.

I like having a rich, sentimental image like this following me through life. I’m convinced we’re all sentimental (if we’re honest and not sociopathic). By this word I don’t mean any kind of unexamined, saccharine idealization of some past version of reality. Rather, I mean that we really did experience real things in our pasts, and those things carry with them real emotions, real artifacts of our real selves. In some sense, sentimentality can give us momentary access to who we used to be in the past. It is a simultaneous connection and rupture. We know we can’t return to that person or that experience. And we know that we can’t really feel anything the same way again. And yet… some part of that reality is there for us in our sense of sentimentality. It’s akin to a certain scent or song taking us back to a prior state of being. There’s nothing wrong with this. Moreover, I suspect it has some adaptive advantage for the species by stimulating social/familial/relational/tribal/spatial cohesion.

In any case, I think making the image of life in the form of tiny sapling breaking up between the bricks has been a worthy thing for me. It’s a little picture of triumph in the midst of hardship. I’m glad it resonates with so many people. I’m glad variations of this piece hang in homes all over the world. And I’m glad I’m still here to appreciate it and add to its legacy.

I’m glad I didn’t miss these last eight years. There have been a lot of situations to overcome, but the life I’ve seen makes it all worth it. Here’s to another year. Peace.

If you’d like to inquire about purchasing the traumaversary robot version of Situation and Circumstance Overcome, contact me over here.

Two Years After

Posted on by under Life

Well, I think I said all I really needed to say at the one year anniversary of my cardiac arrest – you can read about that here.

But I still wanted to throw a few remembrances up here to mark the occasion. What’s interesting to me is that even before I was really making memories again (because of the medications, etc) I got back some of my sense of humor.

Apparently I still felt waaaay out of it, as you can see here:

But I REALLY loved that oxygen mask…

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It’s always nice to get a dose of high-percentage oxygen while pretending to be Darth Vader!

I woke up a couple times before being back to myself, which was about a week later on February 24th. Here’s a picture of me in my natural state – on the iPad :)

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I like this picture because it’s the first one where I seem normal – holding my head up, looking focused – after the event. I think it’s good to mark these “traumaversary” days with thankfulness – and I am.

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It’s amazing how little Atticus was then, how big he is now, and how that amazing personality is shining through. I loved how my kiddos came around me. Those notes and hugs are so precious to me. I have saved many of the drawings, notes, and other ephemera that came to me in that room in Utica, NY.

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I have scars on my arm from where the port was in, and scars on my nose from where I tore out my intubation… man, I’m glad I don’t remember some of that stuff… throwing up, aspirating on the vomit… ugh.

Glad to be on this side of it. And to have worked out enough to shrink that massive neck paunch I had back then. Sheesh!

An Update on my February 2016 Resolution

Posted on by under Life

Of the last 685 days (since my heart attack), I’ve worked out on 627 days, beginning the second week of April – those early months were light. I worked out exclusively under supervision by the Cardiac team at the University of Missouri Hospital. After 12 weeks of observed/monitored exercise, I was cleared for doing it on my own.

By September 2016 I tried to do a heavier workout every other day. In January of 2017 I began to do those workouts daily. I am up to 359 days (including today) of “full” work outs – 45 to 60 minutes of elevated heart rate and an average of 4.6 miles of walking/running. Maybe that doesn’t seem like much. Even to me it doesn’t seem like a lot… but when you factor in my medications and how they change my energy and recovery, as well as the time it takes to get to and from the gym, shower, coordinate schedules with my wife and kids and teaching… yeah, it’s a major commitment.

In the past when I was more of an athlete and worked out consistently (before we started a family), my endurance and strength were much higher than they are now. But I’ve always been prone to overuse injuries – both rotator cuffs have problems from those years in my late 20s/early 30s when I lifted weights. Now I work on weight machines for only a small portion of my workout and try to keep impact to a minimum. I generally cycle through squats at 80% of my body weight (I press between 180 and 210 lbs), pectoral presses at 120, 100, and 80 lbs, curls at 100, 90, and 80 lbs, abdominal crunches at 150, and tricep presses at 150 and 130 lbs. The most important part of this work out is the squat portion, since my hips, knees, and ankles are pretty weak and painful. I’ve definitely grown in strength, endurance, and bodily comfort over the last year. I feel better than I have in 5 or 6 years.

Most of my workout time is spent walking, running, biking, or using an elliptical (I cycle through the different exercises over a few days). I also do some rowing and stair stepping from time to time.

So what’s the point of sharing this? I don’t have any big triumphs. I’m not reaching my ideal weight. I’m not prepping for a marathon. I’d be one of the first to be cut down in the Zombie Apocalypse. I still struggle with eating right (though we are mostly vegetarian in our daily diet as a family). I still love beer and carbs. I’m not sure that all of this effort is really helping me physically. But I do feel my awareness of my self and my experiences of living are more present in my mind these days. I do think it makes a difference for my heart health. Beyond all of this, though, the time spent working out is time for reflection and thinking about what interests me. It’s personal time. It’s mental health time.

Now if I could only manage to sleep more…

Becoming The Student: Jacob Luis Gonzales

Posted on by under Art, Life

“Right now I have a Left Ventricular Assistive Device (LVAD) helping my heart function. When the doctors at Barnes Jewish Hospital originally put this device in my body they said I had a 50% chance of living with it until July 2016, and I recently heard this a couple of weeks ago. This forced me to think about what I want people to remember about me if I do pass away. ” – Jacob Luis Gonzales, January 2016


Above: Conversations With Jake. Digital drawing, created in Procreate on an iPad Pro using an Apple Pencil. October 2016.

I’ve been wanting to work up a portrait of Jake for a while. The last year + of his life has been extremely hard. He went through 13 major (life-saving) surgeries over the summer of 2015, was resuscitated over 75 times, experienced fevers as high as 108 degrees, and has had to relearn how to do essentially everything. 

But I don’t want to just make some inspiration porn. Jake doesn’t need that. No one does.

I want to encourage you to hear his own voice, his own story in his own words. First, go read through some of that narrative at his blog. Second, consider donating to his on-going care. He needs help, from more complex stuff to just the basics. Go to his Go Fund Me page to directly donate. If you’d rather help out in a different way, I’m selling some artworks to help Jake and Ali: go here to see Situation and Circumstance Overcome – if you like it, order it, and I’ll give 100% of the sale to the Gonzaleses. Here’s what it looks like:


Lastly, if you are local and a friend, consider making time to go hang out with Jake and Ali. The time I spent drawing Jake was full of laughter, real talk, sharp wit, intense remembrances, and some solid sports and movie talk. They’re awesome people. 

Thanks for being a part of project, Jake (and Ali’s feet!).