Artist Sketches to Cope with Addiction

Clean II, a gallery show exhibiting artwork themed on the complex struggles of addiction recovery, currently on display at , doesn’t limit itself to just those recovering from substance abuse, but from those recovering from there own role in the downward spiral of addiction.

“I am the other side of this– I am the enabler, so to speak,” said Donna Marie Fisher, an exhibiting artist. “I’m the one who cries the tears on the side watching addiction go from the hair-raising beginning and to the other side.”

Fisher, a life-long art teacher, watched her son struggle and eventually recover from addiction, and is watching the repeat with her grandchild, who is not yet clean. “So there’s still tears to go,” Fisher said.

A significant challenge in the process of recovery addiction doesn’t even lay with the addict, but with family and friends.

“We that are on the sidelines, we kind of enable them, because we think we can fix it.” Fisher, however, came to realize she her efforts were doing more harm than good. “That takes a little while, because your head is buried in the sand a whole lot of the time. You do not want to come out of the sand pile and take a look, because you’re not going to like what you see, but you kind of know that. And then you think ‘Well, I can fix that. I can love her, I can love him sober... and you can’t.”

Fisher's piece, Breaking Addiction, started on a trip to Lake Carlos State Park. Fisher enjoys snapping pictures of the area, looking for potential paintings. Taking a picture of some rather stark trees home with her, she began sketching, and the bleakness turned her thoughts toward her grandson, where he was and how he was coping his his addiction.

When she recieved a call from the gallery about the Clean II exhibit, Fisher sat back down to her bleak, winter scene and let the emotion and memories of addiction, and its effects, flood over her.

For those on the sidelines, the pain often comes from having to get tough with loved ones and drawing a line in the sand. It can generate a lot of guilt as well. "I still walk around with some guilt because you have to get hard with them and say ‘wait a minute, you’re destroying my life, and I can’t let you do that.’”

Holding that line and coping with the effects of addiction in loved ones, Fisher said, is "the hardest thing I've ever done in life, and I was a fighter pilot's wife."

Clean II - a turning point, exhibits at Your Art’s Desire Gallery of Art & Framing through the end of September.