Since her brain injury, world-renowned artist Ginny Ruffner has had to discover different and more inventive ways to create her art.
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I'm stubborn. I was not--and I learned how to work with glass,
and actually painting and drawing again just by doing it.
I just really wanted to do it no matter what, so I just persisted.
I think that is 9/10ths of it, it's not--
You know how they say something is 9/10ths perspiration and 1/10th inspiration?
I think it's probably 1/10th perspiration, 1/10th inspiration, and 98% persistence.
My accident has made me more creative in that it made me have to figure out
if I'm here and want to get there, I can't just go that way.
What can I do to get there?
How can I get there?
And that is--by that example I mean everything from
physically getting from point A to point B,
to drawing something, or communicating in a certain way with a specific audience.
So it's made me more creative in that I have to figure out
if I can't do it the way I used to, how can I do it?
Produced by Victoria Tilney McDonough, Ashley Gilleland, and Jared Schaubert, BrainLine.
Ginny Ruffner is an internationally acclaimed artist who lives in Seattle, Washington. In 2012, Ruffner was featured in a feature-length documentary called Ginny Ruffner: a not so still life, which focused on her refusal to let a debilitating brain injury slow down her drive to create art, the film challenges viewers to see the world from a new and unexpected perspective.
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Watch this clip about world-renowned artist Ginny Ruffner, who refuses to let a debilitating brain injury slow down her drive to create art.- Ginny Ruffner: a not so still life
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- Artist Ginny Ruffner was in a coma for five weeks, in the hospital for five months, and in a wheelchair for five years. But she never considered giving up her art. "Giving up art is like giving up having green eyes. It's who I am, not what I do."
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Comments [2]
After my head injury I was left with hand shaking and I could no longer sketch I am painting now and have found that in drawing water my hand shakes make it easier. I am not as detail oriented as before and now as long as the spirit of the image is there I am happy. trying not to sweat the small stuff. KLS
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After I had my life-saving brain injury, I was extremely hard put to make anything happen for myself; however, I utilized my affinity for creative writing: poetry, and, despite the fact that I was faring miserably in most of my classes, including Junior English, I continued to excel in creative writing. Following my having undergone one final operation to replace the malfunctioning ventricular shunt in my brain, I was able to flourish, once again, in my other content areas courses. Upon my graduation, I served as one of the school literary magazine's editors and, five years later, took a bachelor's degree in creative writing. Recently, I finished a Masters of Education degree in writing education: the thesis of which was an alternative poetry-intensive curriculum to facilitate learning-disabled individuals' acquisition of specific writing skills that rhetoric-intensive curricula do not facilitate. The definition I used to define poetry is: "the best words, in their best order."
Oct 3rd, 2012 1:05pm