Author Archives: timouth

Chinasaur

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Somewhere I read about the term “disambiguation” as relating to a species moving in to replace another species that had left the environment (extinction). Did I imagine this? Regardless, I like the word. Earlier, I had done an abstract painting that reminded me of a t-rex skeleton giving way to a flying bird, and I called it “Disambiguation”. Other abstracts from that time with a similar color scheme became part of my disambiguation series. Painting colorful fish into that painting made the abstract less ambiguous.

The other day, I played dinosaurs with my grandson, and then did a painting of dinosaurs in the trees, the way I’ve been painting fish into the branches of trees for years. So these themes evolve, too.

Liam brought me a plastic dinosaur and asked what kind it was. I looked on the underside of it to see if there was a name, but the only word there was CHINA. “Oh,” I said, “this is a Chinasaur.”

Art and Math

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I was certainly drawing and painting before I could read and write. That was my thing from early on. My own visual language developed over the years, not because I wanted to sell paintings… not even for the compliments I would get on what I created. It was my own means of expression, long before I had words to describe or explain the process or the meaning behind the images.

I thought I couldn’t do math. I never memorized my multiplication tables. All through elementary school, Jr. High and High School, even in to college, I believed that I COULD NOT do math. Then, as part of my nursing education, I had to take a math aptitude test. I thought “I might as well just quit now, because I can’t do math.” Then a college counselor shared a book with me called All The Math You’ll Ever Need. I took it home and read it cover to cover, and worked every equation in the book. Then I turned around and aced the test.

The big shock for me was when I realized that art is math. It’s all math. All the drawing I’d been doing my whole life was MATH!

My own misconceptions about myself held me back from achieving what I actually had the ability to do.

I do not want to allow fear to rule my life. I want to do those things that other people might think that I can’t do. More importantly, I want to step out of my comfort zone and do the things that I didn’t believe I could do.