vanda norrh | Legacy Development

During the last 3 months I’ve had the good fortune to receive the teachings of several people, either in person or through books. It has come at a pivotal point in my human development, and the synchronicity is astonishing.

While going through it, I was only aware that something was happening, but hadn’t put the pieces together until the last couple of weeks. As a visual-thinker, my first thought was to make a drawing.

The first idea was in the form of puzzle pieces radiating from something undefined in the center. After doing that, however, I realized I was leaving out a couple of elements, and rather than expand the puzzle (which I tried to do to an unsatisfying result), I started arranging the influences by their sources. When it was a book, I found an image of the cover and drew it.

From there, I made drawings of the elements of that source (distilled into keywords or images) rather map-like but not slavishly following any “rules”. I left a blank space in the middle because I didn’t know what my central image would be (this is often what happens to me until I’ve gone through the initial design).

After making the surrounding images, I realized that what I was doing was creating an image of myself and what were my core beliefs and influences. So I decided to draw a portrait of myself. This was a challenge for me as an artist-novice.

Here are the “maps”. Enjoy. (BTW this post was created with my iPhone. Ain’t technology grand?)