Long story short, in June of 2012 I tore my rotator cuff due to a bone spur which is part of your bone that just decides to grow a spur of itself on its own and that spur starts tearing into your tendon. I painted the majority of my last exhibition in Los Angeles with this tear which I would later be told was a torn rotator cuff. After painting the rest of that show in extreme pain I then finally set up the date for the surgery to fix my shoulder. The surgery was on December 18, 2012 where they repaired the bone spur by shaving down the bone in my right shoulder and also repairing a significant tear in my rotator cuff and tendon.
The main rub to all this is that the recovery time puts me at being in a tight sling for the next six weeks. I rarely go a single day without drawing on some level. So being told that I would not be able to use my right arm or my right hand for anything for the next six weeks was a rather frustrating development. So just as an experiment I decided to start trying to draw with my left hand. After completing a number of doodles and frustrated sketches I decided to share these in my blog.
So for the next five weeks please check back here for updates. The next few weeks will be nothing but drawings with my left hand and me describing how the recovery is going.
I also want to say that I would never presume that this is an immense hurdle to overcome. There are people that have had severe injuries that have done amazing miraculous things with body parts that were not meant to do what they are now capable of. This is purely my thoughts and feelings and left-handed experiments during my own personal pain in the ass of an arm, as it were.
These first few blog entries are from the first week of recovery then they will catch up to present time daily updates. So this first blog has photos of the actual repair over my shoulder and the sling that I'm in.
