Tree to Tree

- Recovery Transformation Drawings, Watercolors, Oil Paintings and Collage

By
Bittin Foster

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March 3, 1993

TBI Challenge! Washington, DC

Spring 1993

I am a visual artist who experienced a head injury in July 1989, at age 21. I’d like to share with you the reader, who I was before my head injury and who I become today. Since childhood, I’ve had relatively high artistic skill, ingenuity and creative problem solving approaches. I was active in social and physical activities, and of course art. My first college years were full of painting, drawing, photography, sculpture and printmaking. In these years I became aware of this intense desire to create; create anything and everything out of anything and everything I found.

I returned to the Colorado University in January 1990, six months after the accident trauma. I enrolled in Geography and clay hand building. I felt nearly overloaded with such a schedule. I taped my lecture class as I could not fully listen and write at the same time, then used the tapes to complete my notes. Memory cognition, emotional regulation and physical balance were more difficult for me after the accident. Many situations were overwhelming and confusing. The learning that occurred in my Hand Building class was directly related to social interactions and the regaining of my artistic confidence. My drawings and paintings held none of the precision they had previously. I barely had any patience painting and felt limited by the flames of two dimensional surfaces.

In February I made a commitment of survival; I wrote and drew in my journal every night. I knew that I had to consciously work if I wanted to get ‘better’. My daily drawings were mostly representational until I discussed brain neurons with a friend. She explained neuron connections with her fingers, making analogies to tree branches. What a powerful visual image for me! The lines in my drawings reflected my visualization of neuron “trees” in my brain Months passed; the trees grew more complex and conceptual as I consciously used creative visualization to help heal my brain damage (Tree to Tree: Seven Journal Drawings).

More direct therapies included physical therapy for my back, which was seriously injured in the accident- along with psychological therapy, cranial sacral work, massage and rolfing. All were with private therapists, however I also joined a rehabilitation support group. I felt that the people in Group knew deep down how I felt when I said ‘I feel/felt confused when…’ What a new comfort and wonderful support I had found. Although some of my cognitive abilities will never return as they were before, I have learned to compensate for and accept most of my new abilities. I believe that all of theses therapies, especially the few early on, helped me recover more fully today.

In summer 1991 I began practicing meditation while also painting in a private studio. Looking back on these months, my paintings seemed to have come from a deeply unconscious place within me that I had never touched before. Implementing an artistic approach of Rudolph Steiner, founder of Waldorf Education, I dropped all judgement and preconceptions of what I “should” be painting, and let the forms and emotions evolve from looser color washes laid down on the painting surface (Screaming Women Series).

Fall of 1991 was my graduating semester from college, five and a half years from my college entry. I had a general idea of what I had wanted to produce for my graduating class art exhibition: a gigantic collage that expressed the culminating effects and transformation that I had experienced from my brain injury.

Just as I overcame physical, mental and emotional deficits, my culminating artwork had to break boundaries. It had to be big. Numbers have always held power and magic for me, 11 and 7 especially. I ascribe to the 7 year cycle theory of Steiner. Complete and drastic changes came in my 21st year, the third 7 year cycle. Eleven was my favorite number from school athletics. The piece, then, would have one tree, 7 emerging female figures and it would be 11 feet in total dimension. Three columns with three panels each, all being grounded by one long panel, a metaphor of separate pieces creating one whole.

I first visited Italy in 1985 with high school classmates and art teacher. In January 1989, I returned during my junior year at the University of Colorado, Boulder to attend an art school in Florence, Italy to learn ‘traditional’ methods of art. That summer I traveled freely through Europe, Greece and Egypt and painted a series of watercolors to record my impressions as others might use a camera (Traveling Watercolors). I was living each day to the fully, enjoying the native peoples, customs and sights.

The nature of the background came to me in meditation…Text! I would transfer all of my journal writings that pertained to my injury and transcribe them onto the back side of used papers-175 pages plus recent X-rays, doctors’ and therapist’s statements and family communications. I photocopied the journal writings and bound them into a book to be read next to the final piece. I wanted to touch the viewers from a different level of communication, the intellect. ( In February 1993 I taped the journal writings onto the audio cassettes to touch yet another sensory input, the auditory. This is placed next to the piece and the book.) I glued the pages, spiraling out from the center of the 10 panels that comprise the huge collage which I essentially christened Bittin’s Piece: Seven Inner Women. The piece as a whole could not be realized in only 2 dimensions. I finally devised a material and process (actually utilizing those stupid Styrofoam peanuts, a juicer, flour, water, Elmer’s glue, and nails) that was suitable for molding into a 3-dimensional image. In the final collage, as the “7 inner women” become the tree, my own pain, metamorphosis and spiritual healing are symbolized. Creating Bittin’s Peace: Seven Inner Women was part of my healing process and transformation: I was able to process and accept what has happened to me on a new, deeper level.

This new February an opportunity arose to mount an independent show at the Boulder Artists Gallery (BAG). After attending a Colorado Head Injury Foundation, Boulder chapter support group meeting I felt inspired to create a show depicting the art I had created before, during and after my injury. There are six bodies of work including my culminating expression. In the clumsiness of some of the exhibitions drawings, in the distortion and exaggerations of the Screaming Women, were the reflections of my limitations-but also the seeds of my recovery. This show, entitled Tree to Tree: Recovery Transformation was, once again a transforming experience. The BAG show was a catalyst for the exhibit to travel throughout the country to State Head Injury Conferences and galleries.

With this traveling exhibition, I wish to inspire others who have experienced life threatening/changing events, specifically traumatic brain injury, to strive for greater recovery and transformation.

We, who have experienced head injury are a fortunate few who have been given a second chance: a chance to live, love- to be alive!

Egypt is the most wonderfully mysterious, rich and beautiful country, but it is here where I experienced my injuring car accident. My dear friend Adel was killed. I was in a coma for five days. They diagnosed me with severe edema in my right frontal lobe. Coming out of that was difficult and confusing. I didn’t know who I was or where I was until I was taken there. I didn’t know what was the matter with me, but I knew that something inside of me was ‘fundementally’ different. I remember looking in a mirror and intellectually knowing that I was seeing my reflection, but emotionally not knowing who that person was. Because of my particular type of injury, my brain had to re-experience the developmental stages of growing up again as I regained cognitive, emotional and spiritual consciousness. My limitations also included lessened physical balance and confidence. I received cognitive testing 3 weeks after the accident date and the tests showed that I was unable to complete fundamental tasks, thought processes and mathematical calculations that were ‘appropriate’ for a person my age.

(Insert photo & Caption: A View from the Bed, a watercolor painted August 28, 1989, one month after Bittin sustained her head injury)

(Insert Photo and caption: Bittin’s Peace, Seven Inner Women, an 11’ x 11’ three dimensional collage that reflects her recovery from traumatic brain injury.)