"In my professional life as a Speech-Language Pathologist in rehabilitation facilities I worked with people with impairments in communication and cognition due to strokes, Parkinson’s, and traumatic brain injuries.  When I read the medical reports delineating specific areas of the brain that had been damaged I could predict some of the deficits I would find but no two people were alike and their problems and capacities to recover were widely varied.  Brains and the uniqueness of individual abilities fascinated me.

I began doing these “brain sketches”, the precursors of my Brain Flashes series, after finding some brain cell images on the internet. They were beautiful so I began playing with watercolor, gouache, and a variety of pens, trying to replicate them. But, this process was, in itself, startling. Apparently I had not yet learned what my years of working in the field of brain rehab should have taught me, that my brain would surprise me with its stubbornness and its ingenuity, moving me farther and farther from representation and into some other place, a place of creativity and freedom."

Jill Kneeter