Making Sense of It All

A Drawing for the Disjointed Moments of Realization

Making Sense of It All is the sixth drawing in my Holding Pattern series. Visually, it is one of the most disjointed works in the group. Reds and magentas overlap, interrupt, and compete with one another. Lines begin to establish a rhythm only to be disrupted by something moving in another direction.

That instability was intentional.

I created Holding Pattern during the period surrounding my father's care, death, and its aftermath. I didn't plan the drawings as illustrations of particular events. They developed in moments when making marks gave me somewhere to put experiences I was still trying to understand.

Making Sense of It All came from a particularly complicated part of that process.

While caring for my father, I was learning things about his life and illness that changed my understanding of both. He had been living with cancer for decades, largely without discussing it with me. He had made decisions about treatment, including choosing surgeries while avoiding chemotherapy, that I was only beginning to understand as his condition worsened.

As his cognition changed, so did our conversations. There were things he told me when he no longer consistently knew who I was, things he didn't tell me, and things I was left to piece together from what remained.

There was no single revelation that suddenly made everything understandable. Information arrived in fragments, and each new piece could alter the meaning of something I thought I had already understood.

That experience entered the drawing.

The composition doesn't offer the eye an obvious place to settle. Layers of saturated color intersect and compete for space. Individual marks remain visible, but understanding the whole requires moving among them. That visual instability felt appropriate for a period when clarity itself could be disorienting.

The title is intentionally a little contradictory. I was trying to make sense of what was happening, but making sense of something does not necessarily make it simpler. Sometimes understanding introduces another layer. A new fact changes an old memory. An explanation raises another question. Something that seemed certain becomes more complicated when viewed from another position.

That is what I recognize in this drawing now.

The paper itself also connects Making Sense of It All to the rest of Holding Pattern. All eight drawings were created on archival paper artist tiles rather than the recycled polyester synthetic paper I more commonly use for my ink drawings. Paper absorbs the ink, allowing it to catch, spread, and settle into the fibers. In this work, that interaction between ink and surface contributes to the density of the composition rather than resisting it.

Making Sense of It All does not resolve the experiences that informed it. I don't think that was ever its purpose. It records the process of trying to understand something while still standing inside it.

There are moments when making sense of an experience produces clarity.

There are others when it reveals how complicated the experience actually was.

This drawing came from the latter.