Adam, Eve, and the Devil

This painting measures 22"x28" and was the most complex piece I've ever attempted.

Sorry folks, but no matter what I did I couldn't get the last two detail pics to load in right side up.  I'm a computer idiot.  If you click on an image it will slightly enlarge.

Its a painting of an old biblical story, done in outsider art style.  By someone with a mental illness.  Does my illness show or is this just creativity?  Schizophrenic art is known, for those that are unmedicated usually, to have an abundance of too muchness - crazy energy.

In the last week of finishing the work (which I loosely estimate as having taken 5 months to complete) I had two petite nervous breakdowns.  Been doing so well in life that when I cancelled my therapy appointment because I couldn't get out of bed and drive to the office, my therapist said that I probably just had the flu.  Since my only complaint was inability to move and weakness of body and mind, no drama, he said it wasn't certainly a schizophrenic breakdown.  He did that therapy thing to me, "I'm listening, I'm listening, don't you believe I hear you?" which means "your simply being neurotic, but I'm not going to jeopardize our relationship by confronting you so I'll just appear to go along with what you think".  But I did quite fall apart.  No mental illness symptoms like in the past, no crying, no suicidality,no delusions, no mania, no depression, - my only complaint was that it was very boring not having a head to use.  I understood that my concentration was fucked, couldn't read or watch tv, and later in the evening had a hard time talking or making eye contact with my husband.  Nice husband served me dinner in bed.

Happily, after each day passed, I got a little stronger until my next breakdown.

So I worry, am I on a path to madness.  Since its the holiday season had to cancel two dinners with couples from my husband's job (one dinner with his boss, sorry boss, my wife just had a petite nervous breakdown she isn't up to drinks and dinner) and can't travel to Maine for Christmas in a fishing village by the sea.  Mom is coming down to see us and sleeping on our couch Christmas Eve.  She thinks my father at Thanksgiving had so traumatized me that it is now absolutely necessary I have no further contact with him.  Petite nervous breakdown is solved in her book.  What she doesn't realize that for a while there before she came to visit I had nausea anticipating our meeting each evening leading up to the event, and after one visit ended, hyperventilated and lost feeling in my fingertips.  On better terms with mom now, but my therapist has made commits about how she is a toxic person and at times abusive (exactly what she calls my father, a toxic person, and so she says, you must not have toxic people in your life.  Oh the irony.).  Too bad I love very much this wounded, bullying person.  And she needs me to love her too.  The drama isn't all my parents fault for who they are.  I'm convinced that I'm way too sensitive and take on the emotions of others on a deep, unprotected level.

So more about the painting.  It was first designed as a drawing for a smaller canvas.  Yes, more idiot that I am, all the detail when I first drew it was even tinier.  Had the drawing enlarged 15% and extended the rays in the sky leading out of the tree and redrew the plants on the ground to make it fit a larger canvas.  The rays were rather nebulous and blank in the drawing.  But as I started painting them I first got the idea for the swirls, then later the angelic writing.  Thats what all the tiny symbols inbetween the blue swirls are, angelic conversation about the big event that is transpiring.  Hey, probably in Paradise angels are singing all the time.  I figured the english language is made up of the alphabet, a series of symbols, so I would create my own alphabet.  But I wanted the painting to be interesting, so it was important that none of the symbols repeat.  For a while there I would wake each morning and for an hour of prime concentration, in a drawing book, struggle to make symbols that were new and different from anything else in the world.  It would take about an hour to get a third of a page finished, tough going.  Since the symbols were a late addition, it was fortunate that I had extended the rays in the sky from side to side to fit a bigger canvas - it made more room for angelic writing.  I have enough symbols in my drawing book now that I could probably fill two more Paradise skies and still not repeat a symbol.

When I was designing the drawing the rays were a problem, blank though they were, because they had to be a width so that Eve's hair would not be bisected.  I only knew that the rays would be different colors, and if her elaborate hairstyle (nod to Frida Kahlo) had a line going through it it would be pictorial disaster.  So I got out transparent paper and made paper rays, to position them, and a ruler, to get the spacing even - it was all about math and the priority to frame Eve's hair just right.  At that point I titled the drawing "All about Eve's hair".

I had the idea for the tree of life to have a pattern of leaves that were all original designs.  I didn't look at any reference material to make this painting, no pictures of nudes, no plant life - so I know that what you get is my imagination doing its best to look real.  Oh, one picture I did use was a 1940's Dior couture model for the Devil.  Her dress is called "The New Look" and it was a revolution in fashion dressing.  The devil is not innocent, so she is dressed in the best, while ignorant Adam and Eve are naked.   I tried to do naked as well as I could.  After being familiar with some outsider art nudes I know that the human mind isn't too clever when it comes to sex - most outsider artists butcher the human form because I think we are shy and don't "peek".  Some outsider artists simply haven't ever had sex either.  I know I've been around nudes, but I know too that I don't particularly "peek".   The leaves in the tree are far more distorted than the human form, plant life seems to insist upon handling more liberties.  As long as the primary color is green to suggest leaf life your good to go.  I used all my tubes of green for the tree of life.  I like to paint colors straight from the tubes, which my art school trained father thinks is very limiting.  Bully for him.  Maybe I'll grow into mixing more, since its been now pointed out at Thanksgiving that I am a fool.  But you should see my collection of green tubes of paint!

I read recently an anecdote about the famous photographer Richard Avedon.  A young man who was just starting in photography asked the master for his best advise.  Avedon said that if you go into a photo shoot with an idea about what your picture will look like, and you get just such a picture, then your shoot has been a failure.  What you want is the unexpected to happen, and an end product that trumps your expectations, for expectations are small when the creative process takes over.  In the end this painting looked nothing like what I imagined it would.  It morphed, it elaborated, it vexed, it veered, and then it really did turn out better than what I had planned.

I really liked the journey I took to make this painting.  My only hope is in the future to go on more such wanderings.  Planning mixed with inspiration would be an apt description for my painting style.

And maybe, just maybe I am a little mad.

New Painting, "Shot to the Head"

This finished oil painting is called "Shot to the Head".  I am slowly working a more ambitious format. This canvas measures 22"x 24".  Click on the image to see it enlarged.

The painting was planned by making an initial drawing while I was on two different types of antipsychotic medications.  So it actually started over a year and a half ago.  The pencil drawing plan was put away while I finished other oil paint projects.  A lot of the small pattern in the piece, such as the swirling sky, the striated green ground, or the stripes in the cats, was added after I had come down on the antipsychotic medication.  Everything in the original drawing is still there, except much is added.  I think less meds resulted in a painting that has much more energy and interest than what was first visualized. 

Also, a side effect of being on so much antipsychotic medication was a lot of suicidal thoughts, and in general, wishing I was dead about twice a week.  Or so my husband claims I used to say with regularity, "I wish I were dead".  Nowadays, on very little antipsychotic medication, that phrase never, ever passes through my lips.  I love my life, I love painting.  Lowering the medication resulted in the end to suicidal thoughts and the complete dissipation of depression.  Naturally it was instinctive to plan a painting like this one if you are contemplating your own death.  But if you are generally happy, like I am now, I don't know if it would occur to me to have such violent imagery.  Never say never, I don't know what future compositions will contain, but if you are generally happy and content as I am, pictures like "Shot to the Head" don't enter your imagination.  However, I am considering that I might suffer from PTSD, due to emotional abuse in my childhood, and the violence of that time, its horrid memories, and memories of years of anguish over having a mental illness, still effect me.  I sometimes get so angry at people and the past in idle moments.  I am still a very unsettled soul.  Recently I remarked to my husband "I am content, yet I am tormented."  So who knows what rabbit I will pull out of a hat when I draw and plan a painting.  It might very well be a bloodied rabbit.

Always a driving factor in this painting's composition was the shot to the head.  It is the first thing you notice.  The woman standing on the ground in the black wrap has a tiny bullet hole in her smooth, white forehead, and blood splatter coming out of the back of her head.  The red blood was intended to pop against a light blue sky and to be an emotionally dark counterpoint to the beauty and elegance of the rest of the picture.  I think the garland made up of leaves and flowers is quite pretty, and the clothing the women wear is high fashion, inspired from pictures of models taken mid 20th Century.  So while there is admittedly blood and gore, the painting otherwise is very static and still.  It is a poised and silent, a one thousandth split second frozen image of an event.
 
And then there is the story of the piece of black string.  It is gathered in a ball in the lower left hand.  But unstrung, the black string winds its way around the trunk of the tree, makes it's way down the tree branch, drops to suspend the wooden plank that the woman in the green suit stands on, and then ties around the cat, lifting him up under his armpits.

The title "Shot to the Head" was intended to be more than just a literal description.  It describes what this picture does to the viewer.  It gives the mind a little jolt.  It dazzles the eye.  It shocks.  It challenges.  

I am so much happier with the quality of my artwork nowadays.  I don't care much that it looks crazy.  For a while there I was searching the internet with the google words "schizoprhenic art" and trying to find someone who painted like me.  I wanted to find my tribe.  But what I'm making doesn't look much like anyone else.  I guess this should make me feel happy. 

The first eye that I try to dazzle, excite and please is my own eye. 

Everyone makes very personal art.  Even if its just a vase of flowers.  You make that type of trite picture because you think it beautiful.

My idea of beautiful happens to have a lot of color, a lot of emotion, and the "zoom" quality. 

My art makes your eye "zoom" around the picture.
      

Tea Time Drawing

This is a very complex drawing.  Click on the image to enlarge.  It is a plan for an oil painting measuring 22"x28".  The largest size I can do which will fit on my table top easel.

The drawing was created in two steps.  First I did a half size image measuring 11x14 so that I could get the basic ideas down - where the shapes went in relation to one another, how they filled the rectangle.  The first idea I had for this painting was a naked lady serving as a table.  On her stomach was a tea pot and cup and saucer.  One hand supported her, the other hand is up in the air holding my version of a candelabra.  My candelabra has a central image, a little drama going on between the candles and their crystal droppings.  There is a tiny naked lady, slightly bent, vomiting water.   Water flows in a stream from her lips like a classical fountain.  She stands in a pool of water that is cupped in the center of the candelabra.  When the colors are added the pale blue of the water, with ripples, will be I hope define the watery element.

In my small starter drawing I established first the human table and the figure in the chair.  It mattered to me that the seated woman be clothed, as to contrast the nakedness of the table, and I picked some clothing details from a Vogue magazine advertizement.  The shoes I had to go online and look for on the designer's website.  This idea of having pants under a skirt is picked up this Fall season by several designers.  The skirt pattern is not based out of anything in Vogue or by any contemporary designer.  As it happened while I was creating the drawing (a process that took two to three weeks of working about five and a half hours every day) I watched an old black and white movie.  It was Anna Karenina, staring Greta Garbo in the lead role.  The movie, based on Tolstoy's classic novel, takes place in Russia before the revolution and the over throw of the Czars.  So Garbo was 19th century aristocracy and she wore beautiful full length gowns.  The ribbon and lace pattern comes from one of Garbo's gowns.

It was fun planning the chair the clothed woman is seated in.  I have a book of animal drawings, and I looked for animals that were all a little bit different in their snouts.   The chair will be upholstered in buttons and bulging fabric, probably a light cream color (the swirling background will be deep blues and greens) and the animal heads will carry with them all this cream color, as if they were upholstered too and created out of fabric - natural extensions of the chair.  They may have subtle nuances of color, but definitely the elephant will be cream instead of his natural grey color, and so forth.  The lightest elements of the painting should be the chair, the naked lady table, and the candelabra. 

Where there will be the brightest pop of color is among the flowers covering the floor.  I said to my husband that the simplest thing to draw was the naked woman's breasts, I only had to do them over twice. It is funny they were so simple, yet so essential, - when the final painting is first viewed I think the eye will land immediately on those breasts!   But for the rest, well, I went through three of those erasers that you stick on the end of a pencil.  I drew, erased, and redrew incessantly.  Just the arc of the skirt was considered by millimeters.  For this drawing it seems I have drawn arc after arc.

The trick to drawing the foliage on the floor was variety.  There is some repetition, but I wanted large blooms and small blooms but above all variety in shape.  Nature is a freak in how she invents, I wanted freakishness.  A reoccurring trick was to alter the direction that the tips of the blooms faced.  The floor is not a place where all natural things aspire up toward the sun.  The stalks of the blooms may start by growing upward but there is the final tilt of the bloom, and I hope the eye is drawn back and forth - my aim is to dazzle and overwhelm the viewer's eye. 

In some simple words I can sum up this drawing.  Pattern.  Energy.  Life.  Pathos.  Beauty.

This drawing could not have been created on a higher dose of antipsychotic medication.  Before I could only work two hours, even only an hour, before exhaustion numbed my mind.  To my perception now, what I did before, was pretty simple.  I made simple because I was simple.  Drawing requires you to give it your all and invent creatively on a scale that is but pale comparison to the manual labor of putting oil paint on a canvas.  The pencil moves quickly, the brush loaded with pigment moves slowly.   Now on a low dose of medication I can work an average of five to six hours.  Not only can I attempt more complexity, but I think the ideas flow quicker to me.  I have drawn flowers to trim the bottom of a painting before, but never have I attempted such strange and diverse shapes nor have I been capable of picking up and adapting concept of form from source material in botany books.  In short - what I attempted before on a lot of medication is impoverished in comparison to the complexity I am game to translate now.  Lower the medication and I grow bold.  It feels like I suddenly added IQ points to my brain.

At the height of my dose I was on 200 mg Geodone, now I rest comfortably at 80mg Geodone.  Each time I stepped down my dose, by either 40 or more recently 20 mg, I experienced withdrawal.  It would have been foolish to immediately assume that this was some natural illness suddenly making its appearance on lower medication.  I have been warned in books that the grip of antipsychotic medication is so insidious that coming off of it is ripe with peril.  The last time I went from 100mg to 80 mg was HORRIBLE.  For several days, right before I was due to take my evening dose (when most of the med was gone from my system) I experienced extreme dizziness and the unpleasant sensation that my mind was filled with cotton.  Thoughts would not form.  I told my husband I had Alzheimer's.  Also, I had problems with sudden surges of irritability and anger, lasting usually about two hours.  This made me hard to live with as I found that nothing that my husband said pleased me, and everything seemed to incur my wrath.  I quickly learned as marriage tensions flared to bite my tongue and say nothing when I was displeased.  Now I am peaceful, happy, and my normal self, (and the marriage is good) but it was all rocky for about ten days.

No symptoms of mental illness have made any appearance.  I have no depression, no delusions, no strange fancies, (unless you call my artwork a strange fancy, you are granted permission) no sadness or feelings of worthlessness, no suicidality, no paranoia, - only the flow and ebb of my days where I work in the mornings until I am exhausted and then I can do little physical activity for several hours.  I work, rest, and then enjoy some form of quiet play most days.  What is unpleasant is how I have the urge to overextend myself, and consequence is exhaustion, not of the body, but of the mind.  Physically I'm effected because my mental fatigue is so great that I don't have much will to move about.  So after work I lie in bed and watch a movie.  Sometime in my past a doctor told me that antipsychotic medication would aid concentration and sharpen my wits but as I have learned THIS IS NOT TRUE.  I have come to the conclusion that at the age of 19 I suffered a nervous breakdown where I had delusions and mania, but in the decades after (I am now 44) the greatest and lasting change to my brain was a reduction in my ability to concentrate. When I focus I focus intently, but the concentration does not last as long as it did before my nervous breakdown.

The question in my mind is how low can I go on my medication before either one of two things happen.  The first is that mental illness symptoms reappear.  At such a point I would immediately go back up on my medication to where I had been stable before.  (I consider myself stable at 80mg).  Is there a hiding, lurking mental illness masked and corrected by 80mg of Geodone?  Am I a schizophrenic monster merely being held in check by a low dose of medication?

The second thing I wonder about is my concentration and level of energy.  If I lower my medication and I LOSE the ability to concentrate for five and half hours then I would go back up on my medication.  I LOVE TO WORK AT MAKING ART.  EVERY DAY.  I HATE DISABILITY.  If I lower my medication and negative symptoms of schizophrenia appear or I couldn't work as long (some kind of unhinging of concentration) then probably I would go back up on my dose.

I have an appointment with my medication nurse in mid September.  She was very reluctant to lower my medication before, but I hope to persuade her to lower me more to 60 mg. I am, as she observed in our last visit, competent, and with no current complaints in life, why not try?  I read a statistic on another schizoprhenic's blog that 80% of schizoprhenic's relapse within two years if they stop their medication.  That left 20% who successfully went off of medication.  Could I be one of those 20%?

I greatly enjoy life and making the Tea Time drawing was a blast.  It was fun, it was hard obsessive work, but it gave each day purpose and meaning to an extent that I have rarely experienced before.

Now I can't wait to have the drawing copied onto thin paper and transfer it to its waiting canvas.  Then the paint!  O Lord, how it will sing with color!

Lower Med, Higher Global Functioning

Two weeks ago I lowered my Geodone dose from 120, which is minimum therapeutic dose, to 100mg.  This is a tiny decrease.  However, my medication nurse seemed to think that going under 120mg would have a drastic effect.  She implied that there would be major changes, as the drug worked differently under minimum threshold.

She's right.

Much is different.

I am now painting twice a day.  I paint, as usual, until I am tired and can't concentrate. On maximum dose of Geodone (200mg) this was a paltry two hours and then I suffered.  I mean I suffered agony.  My head felt psychic pain from being overworked, overused, and stretched to its utmost limit.  Then I couldn't paint again during that day, I was finished as far as doing anything with art was concerned.

So high medication, great disability.

Lower medication, much less disability.  Now during the morning I typically paint for three to three and a half hours and then I don't suffer.  I am merely tired.  None of this mental "pain" crap after thinking too much. 

On the medication dose I'm at currently I paint early in the morning and then I do something else.  I take a shower.  I walk to the coffee house.  I go grocery shopping.

This is so new to me.  I believed, for years, that after I finished creative work I had to lie in bed with no stimulation what-so-ever, no music, no tv, no phone, no books, no movement.  Just shut eyes.

I find now that this type of "down time" results in BOREDOM.

Then, as of late, in the early afternoon I'm ready for a second session of painting.  I'm not fresh like early in the morning, and I tend to want to do simple stuff, but I definitely have it in me to create again.

There have been absolutely no psychiatric symptoms of a mental illness on 100mg of Geodone.  No depression, no anxiety, no paranoia, and no delusions.  No funny thoughts that seem weird.  No strange conversational threads.  And no sadness.  The only thing that differentiates me from a non mentally ill person is that I grow tired easily and need to rest sporadically though out the day.  But really, there is nothing to my perception that is schizophrenic or could be diagnosed as schizophrenic in nature.  I'm a bit of a recluse, but I'm not exhibiting signs of being a mentally ill person.

I do notice that I have less desire to socialize and more desire to paint.  Painting never bores me.  And I'm never lonely painting, even though it is a most isolated activity.

And its too soon to tell, but I think my skill at painting has increased.  I just seem to be more sophisticated with the paint.  It could be the accumulation of years of painting.  Or it could be that my ability to make complex decisions has improved.  But I'm certain that I'm very very happy with the results of my creative effort.  I tickle myself when I see what is being created on the canvass.

I'm going to stay at this level of Geodone for three months.  Then, another 20 mg decrease.  I'm operating under the premise of the book "Anatomy of an Epidemic" that states that antipsychotic medication cause brain chemical imbalances.  Because the antipsychotic has altered the structure of my brain it takes time for healing to occur or else there will be psychotic like symptoms and relapse.  The book suggests that being taken off antipsychotic medications quickly does not reveal an illness, it causes an illness. 

I had the God damn presence of mind to stay at 120 mg Geodone for a fucking 6 months.  At the end of this six month period my mind was still changing, becoming stronger - and I had the first experiences of working on art twice a day rather than just once in the morning.  I felt myself healing, becoming a stronger more energetic and assertive person.  A happier person.

My mom says I've got to change the voice mail on my telephone.  It was made when I was heavily medicated.  She says I sound now like a completely different person.  But I don't know how to change voice mail.

I know I had a nervous breakdown when I was 19 and my brain dramatically changed.

But now I'm 44.  I've got a different brain then the one that had the nervous breakdown.  Who says that once you are diagnosed schizophrenic, you are going to be schizophrenic for life?  Is it a permanent condition?

Anatomy of an Epidemic makes one clear point.  As long as you are on antipsychotic medication you will be mentally ill and probably deteriorate.  Over the decades your frontal lobes will shrink.  The symptoms of your illness will continue and may likely intensify.  The medication, in many ways is toxic.  It chemically alters the brain and prevents healing from the mental illness from occurring.

If I have to stay at 100 mg that's fine with me.  Oh, there was one side effect from lowering my dose by 20 mg.  On day two on the lower dose, in the afternoon, I suffered an intense headache followed by scary dizziness.  I couldn't stand, had to lie down.  When I took my evening dose of Geodone the dizziness went away.  And its never returned.

But as long as I feel fit as a fiddle and happy and normal I'm going to slowly, slowly, continue decreasing my antipsychotic medication.

Oh, I forgot to mention.  I feel calmer on 100 mg than I did on 120 mg.

Feeling calm is the most wonderful, luscious feeling in the world.

I love mental health!

New Drawing: Pregnant Woman and Peacock

This is a drawing I just finished today.  It measures 12"x16".  Click on the image and you can see it enlarged.  I like the color, but I'm a little baffled as to what it all means.  I suppose its just meant to be decorative.  Would prefer that it told a story.

I know that when I started drawing it I was going through an intense, stressful series of days.  The painting I had been working on had a lot of repetitive detail and I was horribly bored of doing the same colors in the same pattern again and again.  I know that in the long run the detail is good for the overall look of the painting, (swirls in the sky, think Van Gogh's Starry Night on overdrive, during the daytime, a hundred light blue, purple and yellow swirls) so I was dying to be creative (instead of a craftsperson), and then wham, my home life seemed to head off in a new direction.  I stopped for about a week making art of any sort.  I was stunned.  Events smoothed out, but I hoped that starting a new drawing would be a means to combat stress.  The idea was that I find a new thing to obsess about and throw myself into.  The drawing was a challenge that was personal and private to contradict the feeling that my life was big and fast moving and tumbling out of control.  Control what you can.  At the precise moment you feel powerless.

I was pretty lost for subject matter after I decided I would do an oil pastel drawing.  My mind was giving me images of people with blown off heads, a lot of blood.  Basic scenes of death and carnage.  In fact, in a discarded drawing, I thought I was on the right path making a picture of two monsters tearing off a woman's dress.  Monsters raping a woman.  I felt really tormented and I wanted the characters in my drawing to be tormented as well.

So after a false start, I decided to go with practically all human.  I knew I wanted the bodies stacked, compressed, charred, with contorted limbs.  As it turned out the only figure that really looks upset is the middle male, he has the sort of "woe is me" look to him.  My husband thinks the figure on top is sinister, he calls it a vampire ready to pounce and suck blood.  In no way do I interpret that figure the way my husband does.  The color and the pose were done for artistic purposes.  Don't know where the peacock came from, but it does add something pretty in terms of pattern and I know it also functions as an arc that pulls the picture away from the stack of horizontal bodies.

Added last the pregnancy of the bottom woman.  She had a small stomach in the initial drawing, and I guess as a happy sign of hope, I enlarged the stomach and added the baby.  I find pictures of pregnant women particularly warming.  Life was hard, but it was wonderful as well.  Toyed with the idea that the fetus would be a monster, but rejected this notion. Done that before in early artwork.

On the first layer of color all the figures had nude flesh.  I decided this was too boring.  The hardest part of the artwork to correct from the underdrawing was the man in the middle.  I had settled in my mind that the top person would be the darkest, but it took me a bit to reason out that orange and green would be the main theme on the man in the middle.  At that point I also lightened up the pregnant woman with simple white, while leaving a lot of the color in her contour.

In my present state of mind I absolutely hate doing a background that is simple, without repeating pattern.  I like layering pattern on top of pattern.  What was weird about this drawing is the the flaw of its simplicity was present from the beginning.  The night before I started the drawing I had been crying (from stress) and my husband had strongly suggested that my despair seemed disproportionate, or out of control, and that I take a trilifon.  Trilifon in 2mg tablets is the old fashioned anti-psychotic medication I can take that hits me like a hammer over the head.  I only take them in crisis, and they start to work after about 30 minutes.  Haven't had to take a trilifon in well over two years, just been doing really well.

So I take the Trilifon and my tears dry up.  The next morning I feel drugged.  But it was the morning I've planned to start the drawing!  And the entire composition was created in a two hour time period at one go!  This rarely happens.  Drawings take days to compose, the elements creep out my unconscious mind bit by bit and I don't see where things are headed until the whole is almost done.  So I don't trust the quality of a drawing that is composed so swiftly.  Instead of thinking, "my, how I've grown as an artist" instead I think, "oooh, the drugs stifled my creativity and if it came out fast, it came out diluted and boring".

My negative attitude about an artwork being weak because it happened too easily brings to mind another artwork by an artist I can't name that I saw in an art magazine at the library.  Been going out in the afternoons, after an isolated morning of doing artwork, wanting to be around people, and trying to enhance my art education.  I think you can learn by looking, looking, looking at art.  Our library subscribes to three art magazines.  Galleries take out ads for their current exhibitions, and guess what, they usually buy a full page reproduction of the best piece of their featured artist.  I simply flip the pages and go from one contemporary art work to the next.  Occasionally I read the articles. But most of the education comes from looking at images and thinking about them.  The thinking doesn't go anywhere, its mostly just absorption. And the occasional "shit, he's so fantastic. Out of my league."

There was an article on this artist who recently committed suicide.  I would guess his age was late 50's or mid 60's.  He was obviously really smart and his work tended toward the conceptual.  He had been collected by museums and was working really hard (and I guess drinking hard too, and struggling with depression) before his death.  With the article was a photograph of a black and white wooden birdhouse he made.  The title of his artwork was "Catholic Birdhouse".  Typical birdhouses have a hole in the middle and a peg sticking out for the bird to perch on.  This birdhouse looked typical, but it had two holes, and two pegs.  The bottom hole was large and printed underneath was the text "the easy road".  The top hole was a lot smaller than the bottom hole and was ringed by smears, as though the bird preferred it but had to really squeeze to make it through, and in the process, had lost some feathers, flesh and blood.  The text under the small hole said "the hard road".

Such a simple piece but so evocative.  It said that we wish to enter home (due to the title home can be construed as the Kingdom of God) through loss and suffering - this is "the hard road".  Of course the irony is that either hole, large or small, would have brought you to the same house, the same place of rest and safety, and there was no need for the bird to take "the hard road".  He seemed to freely choose it.  Maybe because of his Catholic upbringing.

Simple art that makes you think.  I said to my husband when my drawing neared completion "is it creative, is it different?"  And he said to me, "have you ever seen anything like it?"  And I thought and then said no.  The drawing of the figures was easy, but over the course of several weeks I have really struggled with the colors.  So by the end, there was some tough finagling to bring this drawing to its conclusion.  I despaired because I thought the road was too easy, thus mistrusting it, but it turned out to have its challenges.  And having some challenges, I was satisfied.

Now I return to painting my God damn sky with one hundred swirls. I anticipate that when I finish just the sky I'll be so sick of painting that I'll do another drawing.

Long live the creative challenge.

The Scream Defended

There are four versions of "The Scream" by Edvard Munch as well as a lithograph.  Two versions were painted and two were done in pastel all between the years of 1893 to 1910.  Two of the paintings and one pastel drawing are owned by Norwegian museums.

Recently the only version in private hands came up for auction at Sotheby's.  There are several detail that make this version very appealing to collectors.  According to Sotheby's it is the most colorful of all created.  And as importantly, it is the only version that is preserved in its original frame.  This frame, designed by Munch, has on it a poem he wrote about the experience which gave him the idea for the image.

"I was walking along a path with two friends - the sun was setting - suddenly the sky turned blood red - I paused, feeling exhausted, and leaned on the fence - there was blood and tongues of fire above the blue-black fjord and the city.
"My friends walked on, and I stood there trembling with anxiety - and I sensed an infinite scream passing through nature."

This version of "The Scream" sold for 119.9 million dollars, and if prices are adjusted for inflation, it makes it the eighth most expensive work of art ever sold.

There is no doubt in my mind that this work of art is an expression of inner torment.  Inner torment, or any emotional state is not so easy to express in a work of art.  You can feel an emotion strongly, but to get that emotion symbolized in an image so that others feel what you are feeling is a difficult feat of communication.  My father says that that this work of art is so disturbing that if you took your thumb and placed it over the screaming figure that the landscape alone would communicate anxiety.  My father paints landscapes, and so he would recognize a landscape that held in it something supremely unique.   This is the landscape of Munch's memory, perhaps distorted by his anxiety, definitely re-created to communicate his mood.  The red of the sky get redder because of its juxtaposition against the blue of the sea.  And it is not red that we have reflected in the sea but emptiness, a bone color that divides and surrounds the undulating red waves in the sky.

 I see compositionally that the diagonal line of the hand railing teleports the background red sky directly into frontal space.  The sky, the viewer, and the screaming figure are all linked by the hand railing.  And I think that any time you have such a bold diagonal running through the picture frame it runs the unnerving risk of dividing the image.  And an image usually such divided creates psychic disturbance because we want harmony and balance in the picture, and this is usually achieved by interrelatedness and repetition.  One spot here is like the other spot there.  That promise of continuity soothes our awareness.  As we are told by Abraham Lincoln that "a house divided against itself cannot not stand", an image with a bold dividing line threatens to scatter the parts.  In this particular image it is the overreaching sky that is not interrupted but instead flows from edge to edge that saves us from the severity of  the hand rail projected almost straight at us.  And of course theatrically what do we have at the end of the hand rail, as if it were the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow or the essence to anchor and mend the division of parts, - is a little man screaming.  There is a slight reference to death in his countenance - he has no hair- as if his skull were exposed directly by the knob of bone beneath, skin stripped away.  Blue lips echo the shape of his head. And the hands are clasped to either side of the face, as if, in body language the screaming man is saying "all this is too much for me, I'm overwhelmed,  I withdraw, I try to save the parts of me that have not been stripped away by my experience."

As an artist I also notice that that the image isn't precious.  And what I mean by that is that it has been done swiftly and emphatically without a slow and methodical process and too much attention to minute detail.  Perhaps there were plans and rough drafts - I wouldn't be surprised - but the final product deals in essences and bold simplicity.  This pastel could have been drawn in a day.  I find it fascinating that the artist repeated the same image in different mediums during a seventeen year span of time.  It is like being haunted by the exact same re-occurring dream.  This dream is trying to express something vital to the soul.

In the analysis I read about the sale of this work, is that the price went so high because the image has become an icon in our culture.  Mention to most intelligent people the name of the artwork and in their head they see a vision of what Munch did.  It has been repeated and repeated on mugs, tee-shirts and referenced by other artist's artwork.  Does it stick in our minds because it is repeated by popular culture or is the repetition an homage to a fundamental fact that at one time or another we have all felt like the little screaming man in the artwork?  We identify because locked in us all is that terrible place of an inner scream.  And the artwork validates for us our experience, it says, humanity is united in the extremes that we must submit to.  Some of us submit and endure, others go under and self-destruct.

Not all experts in the art world have good things to say about"The Scream". 

Rachel Campbell-Johnston, The Times's chief art critic, is not a fan. The Scream's popularity, she believes, derives from a tendency to regard artforms prefixed with adjectives like "edgy", "dark" and "disturbing" as somehow superior to those which are light and joyful.  Indeed, she draws an analogy with a teenager listening to overwrought, depressing music in their bedroom, before learning as they grow older to appreciate a songwriter like Bob Dylan who deals with subtler, more complex emotions.

"The Scream is almost childish in its directness," she says. "That's why you see it in so many university halls of residence. What you get out of that painting is not something that deepens over time.

"It appeals to an immature taste. As you get older you want something different - art that transforms the everyday rather than goes to the extremes of human emotion."

But I have to disagree with Rachel Campbell-Johnston.  Some people - the strong ones - have no fears of the extremes of human emotion.  Me, being schizophrenic, I have no choice sometimes but to live with crippling dark emotional states.  I live with them, let them wash over me, and in time, have even an edge with them because they are familiar and recognized as just me being me.  Recovery from schizophrenia has evolved from a state of wanting to do battle with darkness (kill the sickness) to acceptance of darkness as something that ultimately won't harm me (there is no sickness, just altered states of being).  In order to survive to maturity with this illness I had to absorb it.  Yes, at times, there is a little man screaming inside of me.  But I know that given a bit of time he will stop screaming and other little men will step into his place.  There is the one that basks in simple sunshine, the one that is addicted to bright colors in art, the one that delights in giving and receiving love.  

I will tell you what I think.  If you are sensitive to pain, this is good, because you will be sensitive to the absence of pain.  If you know deep sadness, you are capable of experiencing profound joy.  There is a spectrum to the emotions and a life lived with passion does not deny the currents that flow under our exterior, rather, these currents are identified, examined, and absorbed then disbanded in an ever flowing circle.  I think "The Scream" is embraced by the masses not because the masses are immature, but because most people feel secret kinship with its message.  We move on as adults to a place, hopefully, where adversity and pain does not cut us quite so deeply, but you would be a fool to think this is merely because we deny or suppress or (God forbid), never have anymore the negative experiences.  We simply handle unhappiness differently from when we were young.   Artworks that express only subtly and beauty are appreciated but so is the crude, the energetic, the shocking in art.  Ideally as the individual matures he or she broadens, strengthened, and is still delighted by what is new and different.

Sometimes we want warmth, sometimes we need a pin prick.

If you fear or scorn authenticity in all its wild audacious variety  (and "The Scream" is above all about authentic human emotion) then some part of you is being sorely suppressed.  To your detriment.

 

Feeling Good, Feeling Crazy

I brought my drawing to the framers in town and they scratched "The Gift".  The man's thigh has a green border, the scratch was white through the green and then it moved into the middle of the flesh.  I told the framer than when I had brought the drawing in the thigh of the man had been smooth.  Now it was not.  The framer was very quiet.  Nervous I think.  Waiting for me to blow up like a volcano.  But I said I could fix it.  I didn't know if it would be hard or easy, but it was quite easy.  The framer's are really lucky that they damaged a piece that had been brought in by the artist that created it, and of course, that it was in a medium that could be fixed.  I brought back the drawing yesterday and immediately they put it in its frame.  It now looks really, really good.  It must be the framer's worst nightmare that they damage a customer's art.  Like lawsuit nightmare.  Plus, everyone in town says that they are expensive but that they do such a good job that they are worth it.  So they have a reputation to uphold.  The framer said that he was going to have to review the process by which artworks are handled.  And they gave me a $20 gift certificate.

My worst nightmare is getting a flat tire.  Which I did.  I was parking the car in front of my therapist's office and hit the curb.  The curb ripped the tire.  I had AAA.  So by the end of my therapy appointment a man had come and put on the spare.  They said they would be about an hour, which was perfect, I could have my therapy  while I waited.  After I had called AAA my therapist asked me how I was doing.  Of course I was highly nervous, after all my worst nightmare had just happened and a part of me wanted to be silly and cry, but I said reflexively that I was good.  He made much of this answer.  Apparently there have been lots of days in the past when I walked into my therapists a mess and could not, even offhandedly, say I was good.  He said that healing had occurred.  I think I just like life more on less meds.

My husband said that the number one difference in his eyes between me on this dose of medication and a much higher dose is that now I never say "I want to die".  Apparently this was an expression he said I would use (theatrically?) several times a week.  The worst that its ever gotten recently was the night before a dentist appointment when I said I couldn't see the future.  I didn't want to die but I felt like my life was going to end.  I was just really scared.  Because of the types of medications I take my dentist won't give me normal Novocaine.  She uses an alternate that numbs, but not as deeply.  I need multiple shots during the procedure, and she only knows to give me more AFTER I've cringed from pain. And too there is a limit of how much she can give.  So going to the dentist is a major source of anxiety.

I feel like I want to say to my therapist, "fix me, I'm too neurotic".  I worry so much.  I anticipate little things that are supposed to happen tomorrow with strong feelings of fear.  And usually its all for nothing, like with the flat tire.  Things go well.  Nighttime, after a busy day, is really bad.  I sometimes before bed tell my husband I feel crazy.  But there is nothing crazy about me other than that I'm super stressed and usually worried about something.  No psychosis. No suicidal thinking.  A perfect cure for the crazies is lying in bed with my head on my husband's stomach.  He strokes my hair or my back.  His touch soothes.  I feel safe.  I feel loved.

My husband repeated to me a scene from a play he saw ten years ago.  It was preformed at the psycho-social clubhouse where we first met.  The actors all had mental illness and had created the sketches that they performed themselves.  This sketch was about a guy who had gone off his meds.  He was lying on a couch.  He friend comes to visit and asks how he's doing.  "I'm feeling really creative" he replies.  "What did you create?" asks the friend.  "Well, nothing yet but I know something is coming because my thoughts are really good and really creative."  He friend says, well, why don't you come out with me and we'll do something.  "No" says the guy on the couch, "I don't feel like doing anything.  I'm just going to lay here."

The point of the sketch was that subjectively off meds a schizophrenic might feel good, and more creative, but objectively they have lost motivation, get little done, and live an inferior quality of life.

I ask my husband again and again if I seem normal.  And he says that I act normal.  But I swear, there are times when I feel as mad as a hatter.  Its all internal.  The worst that happens is I crawl into bed or tear up and complain.

Creatively I don't know how the med change has affected me, but I seem to have lost a little motivation.  Not much, but it is the negative symptoms.  Lack of will power.  Some household chores seem harder now to accomplish.  But I am happier, just, a little less effective. 

One big change on the lower dose of meds is that I don't sleep as much.  I sleep 6 to 8 hours a night rather than 10 to 12 hours.  This means that my days are longer and I have much more free time.  The amount that I can concentrate and work on art is about the same, three hours.  So I have a lot of extra time where I'm all alone wondering what to do, usually because my husband works the day and then an hour and a half overtime.  I feel more lonely on less meds. I really have no friends in town, other than some little old ladies from church.  How I would love an artist friend.

So I've started going downtown in the afternoons, (downtown is two blocks from my house) after making art and then some rest, and bringing a book to a coffeehouse.  I have a great library of art books.  I need to get out and be with people.  It kinda sucks that I'm not actually having a conversation with anyone, but it is some food for the soul just to be in human company.  I drink coffee and look at my art book.  Sneak peeks at people.  Its not an exciting life, but I've designed all my theatrics to center around art creation.  Isolation, craziness, and art.  And my husband and my animals.  My siblings and parents on the distant outside circles of my peculiar, mentally ill life.  I don't know if it is heaven or hell.  Sometimes it feels like one, sometimes like the other.  And it can flip flop in the course of three hours.

Since I made that last drawing I've been rather dry creatively.  It seems it took a lot out of me.  I've tried to start another drawing but all I can see is the imagery of what I've just completed.  Its like it is burned into my mind.  And I worry that I can't do better, or at least, equal.  It is really hard to give the drawing away, especially since I don't know if it will be liked or appreciated.  I want to keep it.  I have a spot in my bedroom where I can hang it.  So I think I should hurry up and send it away before I lose the battle to be generous.  Just this morning I was wondering if Van Gogh's famous painting of his doctor who treated him at the insane asylum was given to the doctor as a gift.  I was betting that Van Gogh didn't give it away freely, that he was hoping to sell it.  Maybe, I wondered, if he had given art away as gifts he would not have been lead down the path to despair and shot himself.  I think it mattered to him greatly that nobody in Paris was buying his art.  His art was on display, his brother was an art dealer.  Is there a lesson, that if you give work away when you can't sell it your chances of survival in this life are better?

I like to take myself seriously.  But I can see the merit in acting like a fool.  I think too much of my pain in life is a result of taking myself too seriously.