My Drawing

By jan gero

Much like my father, I have been drawing all my life. As a child, I suppose, it was a way subconsciously of befriending and protecting myself. As a young adult, my drawings got me into the specialty high school of Music & Art in New York. That led me later to architectural studies at MIT and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and my career in architectural presentation in which perspectives, drawn in pen or pencil, or painted, incorporate images of people, cars, trees etc. Concurrently, I was a fashion designer which involved illustrating the collections for presentation and for advertising. Later as a documentary filmmaker I drew graphics and storyboards.

Finally, in my current life, making stories from my fifty years of journal writing, I illustrate them, as I did in the original. I also keep dream journals, which are difficult to describe in words without drawing images. On this last point, I would like to offer advice: take time to pay attention to your dreams. In my many years in psychotherapy, dreams have been a path to my unconscious when searching for meaning.

Drawing pulls me inside myself; I get to externalize what I experience I get to be transparent for a moment.
www.jangero.com

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Nov 17, 2011
• ISBN: 9781462057863

jan gero

I am a journal writer and have written consistently for twenty-five years and intermittently for fifty. From these hundreds of thousands pages I've culled fourteen stories which I offer here with my drawings. I've lived most of my life in New York City but was European through my mid-teens. Today, at seventy-eight, I feel almost as confused and incapable of handling my life as when I was that teenager. I would have thought that my several long-term relationships, eighteen years in psychotherapy, careers in architecture, modern dance, fashion, film-making, and decades of dedication to exercise and nutrition – would be foundation enough to give me a steady hand. That seems not to have happened. I remain frightened of people, any interaction provokes anxiety. Yet, I long to be in the world and in many ways, physically, I am. But inside, I'm still inside. "Who cares?" my friend asks. I care. I want out of this prison, my prison, to show myself in these journal-derived stories. My fears and dysfunction are vivid and evident; however, I believe, my writing expresses what we all feel subconsciously, then suppress, and is, therefore, interesting and relevant. I crave transparency of myself, my self, and that is why I write.

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