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| March 11, 1994 |
The Blade Peach Pages
Toledo, Ohio |
March 11, 1994
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Bittin Foster loves to travel. As an art-education student on leave from the University of Colorado at Boulder in 1989, she used quick sketches –instead of a camera – to record impressions of travel in Germany, Greece, Italy and Egypt.
“I would sit down and have an experience with each place,” she recalls. “I’ve always been very intense.”
By accident, art came to mean much more to the young woman.
Traveling through the Sinai desert, she was thrown into the sand from a careening auto. Broken vertebra and head injuries nearly killed the athletic young woman. “I was in a coma for five days. When I came out I didn’t know who I was.”
Suddenly a stranger locked in a mind as foreign to her as any distant country, she was aphasic, unable to focus, screaming in pain and fear. Her IQ dropped 20 points. “It was like I was a few months old,” she says. “It was hard to get a thought out.”
Painting and drawing became her road map to recovery.
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"Artist Bittin Foster demonstrates the feeling she was trying to convey in her painting" May 2005 |
Small travel sketches- the before- and a huge sculptural tree- the after-bracket a series of sketches and paintings that bare the mind and soul Foster reassembled during long, painful years of therapy. Included are her pathetic first attempts at sketching shortly after awakenings from a coma: random scribbles not unlike a toddler’s first drawings.
Determined to regain wholeness, the young woman set herself a challenge: to draw every night, no matter how frustrating it was. The subject she chose was trees. “I found an analogy between a tree and its branches, and my brain,” Foster says. She calls the series, Dancing Neuron Trees.
Successive drawings over a year’s time show increasing complexity, suggesting the reconnection of neurons. After one year, she was able to draw three leaves on three branches of a tree-and sketch the very first figure.
Slowly returning to class and studio work, Foster began to paint again. She started a remarkable expressionist series on recycled canvases, Screaming Women. They reveal her inner turmoil, grief for a dear friend who had died in the accident, and the anguish of the coma. “It was very cathartic. This was the first time I felt the pain and suffering and terror. The first word I spoke was, Freedom,” Foster says.
Also displayed in the Wolfe Gallery are Dorothy Bryan’s Chemo Paintings, a series that allowed the Bowling Green, O., woman to express emotional turbulence that boiled over during cancer treatment.
Both series touch that dark place in the viewer where fear of disease and death is always lurking. And both series tally happy ends. Bryan today is active and free of cancer, Foster is embarking on a national project to work with people coping with brain injuries.
The dominant work is Bittin’s Peace: Seven Inner Women, an 11-foot by 11-foot sectioned sculptural painting of a tree- her bachelor’s degree project. “It had to be big because it changed my life,” Foster says. Her fascination with numerology as a self learning tool figures in the inclusion of seven women as the tree’s major limbs. And her dedication to recycling is strong in the materials: old canvas, pages of journals detailing her healing, and a filling of tumbled foam pellets and glue, packed and nailed onto masonite panels.
Canvas spread on the floor in front of the tree announces: “Walk-on roll-on,” an open invitation to get up close to the work. Foster since has used the tree metaphor in collaborative projects for persons with head injuries, seeking to overcome limiting attitudes. “I’m not just a survivor, I’m a thriver. That’s something I want to emphasize.”
It took Foster an extra year and a half to graduate from college, not unusual today. Still, few baccalaureate degrees encompass a second lifetime, exactly what Foster says she achieved. “I’m growing up again. Now I can be the me I want to be,” she says.
Foster’s work alone is titled “Tree-to Tree: Recovery Transformation,” and she’s taking it around the country with sponsorship from the National Head Injury Foundation. Once more she’s visiting new places. Yet the terrain inside her brain is more familiar to her innovative applications of art.
