About

How this started

My grandfather, Quinton Lambert Reinhart Carlson — “Papa” — foundationally shaped my good-humored view of the world, gave me my easy smile and love for words, and left me with memories full of deep love and lots of laughter. He died more than ten years ago now, but he is never far from my mind.

Papa spent the last weeks of his life in a hospice facility, drifting in and out of consciousness after a nasty head injury. My mother and I took turns keeping a 24/7 vigil at his side. Despite the incredible stress of this time, those final days also contained yet another gift — one that sent me on an artistic journey that continues to this day.

Although I had spent literally hundreds of days in the hospital during my initial Stage IV neuroblastoma treatment — often similarly accompanied by Papa, and not to mention the following years — this was the first time I wasn’t the patient. Instead, I was often fully conscious, un-medicated and alone with my thoughts. I quickly grew tired of my favorite “clinical” past times: reading, watching TV, playing video games. The option to doomscroll was not yet at one’s fingertips. Even writing, which I had so often turned to for reflection and healing on my own medical odyssey, provided no solace.

So the stress continued, and the pressure built, looking for release.

Until, sitting one afternoon by my grandfather’s side, tapping a sharpie against a paper coffee cup in nervous agitation, I began to absent-mindedly draw a simple pattern that I would come to call a “Nerve Blossom”.

First, a large circle in the center. Then four large, wavy branches that seek the edges, followed by smaller branches continually splitting and splitting until the area between them is filled. As my overloaded mind jumped from one thought to the next, so too did my marker move to another unfinished section — and somehow this act of psycho-somatic synchrony transformed my conscious experience from an aimless, formless restlessness into a sensation of steady, balanced progression.

I instantly recognized the feeling of meditative release, and eagerly moved on to the next piece of late lunch leftovers — an unused paper plate — and filled it with a similar single-mindedness. That moment of artistic creation transformed my experience over the following weeks, letting me positively manage both my stress and my time, and even give the results as gifts.

Everyone who looks at them sees something different; for most people it brings to mind veins or trees or, fittingly given my initial diagnosis, nerve cells. I now notice the pattern everywhere I look in the world around me — in satellite photos of rivers and the underside of leaves and sand dollars, in the cracks spreading under springtime ice and the brilliant after-image of a lightning strike.

In those early weeks, when I first showed her my earliest creations, steadily growing in complexity and size, my grandmother would say that they reminded her of “all the different paths that one’s life could take”.

Thanks to Papa, I now know that no matter where my path leads me, I will always have a way to make it more beautiful.

The work since

Nearly one hundred finished drawings across thirteen years — but it has never once been planned!

None of it happens in a studio. These get made on kitchen tables, in waiting rooms, on trains, at dinners and concerts. The whole practice fits in a coat pocket, which is probably part of why I've been able to stick with it so well.

I also still write occasionally; a few places where you can find that work are listed below.

Elsewhere

• sebgillen.comWriting and everything else
• We Are In The FutureNews from the World of Tomorrow, Today

Prints and enquiries

Most works are available as prints. For availability, commissions, or exhibition enquiries, email sebgillen@gmail.com.