An Artist's Evolution Part I

I started making art in a psychiatric institution.  The ward was locked and I lived there for two years.  I had my brother and sister drive me to this hospital when I was nineteen.  I rather thought it was like a hotel where you could check in and check out.  But once they had me, they didn't want to let me go.

When I arrived I could not read.  As the year before I had been reading Emmanuel Kant and Henry James, some of the most difficult philosophical and literary text ever devised, not reading really bothered me.  I had to have something to do to pass the time. Since  I was new to the hospital my mental state was unknown to the staff.   So movement and privileges were severely restricted.  I asked my mother to bring me two things.  Artist's plastic modeling clay and the largest box of Crayola crayons she could find.  I wanted as many colors as I could get.

What I fashioned from the modeling clay wasn't much.  It was one shape, then destroyed in my fist, and another new shape.  I don't think I take naturally to sculpture.  But the crayons were my joy.  I didn't draw with them at first.  I suppose my mind was too destroyed at that point for drawing.  What I did was make crayon rows.  I simply arranged the sticks of color.  An orange crayon next to a blue crayon next to a green crayon next to a red crayon.  Each crayon tight touching the next.  My premise was that in a line of fifty colors there are some harmonies of sequence that work better than others.  It is rather subtle to say that a melody is arranged of deep notes, loud notes, and quite notes when you are considering strict linear contrasts of pure pigment - but that is indeed art.  The compositions I arrange today on my sheets of paper using oil pastel pull the eye in circular and diagonal movement.  I am in no way an abstract painter today.  But when my mind was stripped bare and hardly functional, my artistic talent could only be in terms of fundamental color interplay.  And pretty much, if I must be honest, my biggest challenge in my contemporary work is in terms of color interplay.  You do not know the oodles of time, really countless, that I have complained to my husband "This work is a disaster.  The colors are all wrong."  I love color more than I love chocolate.

My crayon rows were done while I was sitting on the floor under a table.  In our main common room there was a table next to the window that held potted plants.  While underneath, people didn't bother me.  It felt safe.  And at the time, I didn't wish to walk.  I preferred to crawl from room to room.  All that crawling wore out the fabric in my pants and made my knees red.  Sitting under tables was cool too because people would come and have interesting conversations and not even know you were present.  I enjoyed listening to secrets and gossip.

As I started to recover I tried to read.  I had my mother bring in all my children's books she had kept as mementos.  The patients were my audience.  I remember reading "The Little Engine That Could" about a train climbing a mountain to a man who had both wrists heavily bandaged from a suicide attempt.  We sat on the floor together, backs against the wall, shoulder to shoulder to look at the pictures in the book.  I remember him being very happy but a bit bewildered having this story read to him.  And every night, before bed, I read one new Chinese fairy tale from my illustrated Chinese fairy tale book to my roommate.  This made her grow very fond of me.

Then I started drawing with the crayons.  And a morning ritual developed.  I wake early, so this was done while most everyone was still asleep. I would go to the end of the hallway where there was a large window and sit on the floor in front of it.  Usually it was still dark outside. I did five scribble drawing.  They were done very fast with no conscious guidance.  Too slow and I would be "thinking".  I didn't want to "think" while I scribbled.  What fascinated me was that no two drawings looked the same.  Day after day my scribble trove grew, and never ever did I repeat myself.  I viewed the scribbles as a direct product of my unconscious mind.  For if I was not consciously guiding the scribbling hand, what was?  And why should the product of the unconscious mind be endlessly original?  Then, like with the reading of children's books I started pulling other patients into my service.  I would show a patient my scribble trove.  Next it was explained that I was collecting scribbles, and I wanted to see their personality in a scribble.  What the patients who participated did was illuminating.  I realized that there were indeed new ways, with new people, of scribbling.  Each person had their own scribble style.

The patient who was most ill was non-verbal.  Even if you could force him to talk, (rather, I didn't force, I sweet talked) - what came out was a classical word salad.  Words grouped together that had no attachment to one another.  There was intelligence in his eyes, total awareness, and I can only assume that he knew it was impossible for him to communicate verbally.  Probably he was exasperated or embarrassed with his disability so he preferred silence.   To me his scribble effort was the most frightening.  It was just a tiny grouping of a few lines in the center of the paper.  This he gave me after a lot of my coaching to try, just try.  My scribbling was expansive and energetic and covered the whole paper.  Next to me was impoverished and limited.  I tested him again and again to see if he could improve.  Nope.  If ever a scribble could look hopeless, his did.

After the children's books, I moved on to short magazine articles.  It would take an entire year of healing before I could read my first book.  That book was "Rock Star", a torrid love affair by Daniel Steel.

Eventually it became clear to staff that I was odd but totally harmless and they let me use scissors.  I cut colored construction paper.  There was a bulletin board that the doctors said I could have to decorate.  I remember doing a monster scene that was reminiscent of Miro abstraction, but with eyes and mouths.  I wanted then to go bigger.  I stared decorating the wall next to my bed.  Just put rolled tape on the back of the cut out paper and it will stick to the wall.  Never did I think I was making art.  I was just making.  For the fun of it.  To escape the violence, the hopelessness, and the tedium of the hospital.  Mental escape while you are a physical prisoner.  Staff eventually said that my wall in my bedroom had so much paper on it that it was a fire hazard and I had to reduce it to a third of its size.  In tears, I destroyed it all.  It had been a popular landmark, patients standing in the doorway to look because no one was allowed to go into someone else's bedroom. What did it mean? they would ask me.  Nothing, I said, it meant nothing.

As my skills in reading improved, I tried to write short one page stories.  And I started drawing in proper.  I had not drawn since kindergarten.  I would make a small monster in pencil, and then when the lines were corrected and I got I wanted, I went over the pencil with a ball point pen.  A patient looked at a collection of about fifteen small drawings of absurd little impossibilities (for none of my drawings could have ever existed in nature)  and said it looked like something he saw in a book.  A book of what?  A book on an artist.

It took everything out of me to create a sentence or to sketch a tiny two inches by three inches monster.  There was no creative flow.  I know now, as a mature artist, what it is like to be in creative flow.  But in the hospital, my concentration would not permit the linking together of moments in my mind.  In every sentence I wrote I remember struggling over the order of words.  I wrote and re-wrote sentences.  Linking sentences to form a paragraph was the hardest because the thoughts jumped abruptly from one sentence to another.  Like my shattered mind, my paragraphs also were shattered.  But I had time to edit endlessly.

Letters to friends and family were written on brown paper bags ripped up into an uneven shards.  Pencil is just visible on paper bags, readable, but with some eye strain.  My Uncle apparently was very alarmed at receiving his paper bag shard in the mail. I doubt it was alarm over what I said, it was the oddity of the physical manuscript.

When my sister came to visit me during her spring break from college she brought her college boyfriend.  He was an English major and wanted to be a professional writer.  I shyly let him read two one page stories.  One story was about a beast named Misery and the other story was about a tiny thimble sized King who God smites.  Obviously I was just echoing my current condition in life.   

My sister said her boyfriend claimed, after reading my stories, that he might as well give up writing.  My sister said he really was in turmoil.  Maybe he was a bit jealous of me?  Why did my writing make him despair?  Perhaps he felt that a woman in a psychiatric institution should not produce writing that was superior to his own.  No doubt he considered himself quite sane.  And someone whose sanity was in doubt should not get away with producing evidence of superior talent.   

This fellow's reaction to my writing was the first time ever I considered the idea that madness can produce brilliance.  Not everyone's madness.  But yes, it is so, in the case of the rare few.   I love, love the work of the Victorian painter Richard Dadd after he went mad.  Before, he was only so so.  Before he was romantic and a technical virtuoso.  But after the breakdown he went places no sane mind would venture.  They say that artists in the artworld haven't been inspired by Dadd that same way that musicians and writers have.  I think sane minds loath to break rules of reality.  Our eyes are constantly giving us visual reminders of what reality is.  Questioning the sanity and rules of the eyes is hard to do.  I know in this era of modern art all the abstractions seem to point to the artist's mantra that reality doesn't have to impinge in artistic creation in the least.  But the best painters, in my taste, make a poem out of reality.  They make reality rhyme.  They make reality into a song, into a taste.  But they hang onto something essential and then add the spiritual.  Dadd's spiritual was demonic.  I don't mean this to mean evil.  I mean it as the opposite of law and order.  My art too is demonic.  A very early oil pastel drawing was once shown to an immigrant baker of bagels.  He called it "devil's crap".  I don't think he knew much about art. But he was keen to his senses. 

De Kooning's Alzheimer's; My Alzheimer's Drawing

The title of this oil pastel drawing is "End of Life".  When I was designing it I didn't know what it was about, story wise.  And I didn't know what I was doing, nor what I was drawing, nor why why I was drawing it.  For a while there, I was really disturbed by what I was making. The violence and darkness of the subject matter didn't bother me.  I was disturbed by internal variations in my normal sensation of creative flow.  In this drawing, somehow, my creative process was less satisfactory.

However, its final phase, the story is very straight forward and clear.  The drawing is a variation on the Greek myth of the three fates.  The three fates were women who dealt with string and the timing of one's life.  One Fate to spin the string, one Fate to measure the string, and one  Fate to cut the string.  So a person's lifeline was created, you lived it out, and when a Fate cut the string, you died.  The black string in "End of Life" is perhaps less about measurement and more about the assent from earth into the afterlife.  A journey is taking place.  A transference.  Movement from the Earthly plane (why, there's green grass on the ground) to a more celestial plane (the cart is flying through the blue sky).  Note the baby saint, or Jesus, in the womb of the winged Billy Goat.  Is it a symbol of rebirth?  Is it a symbol of the destination of Heaven?  Is it a symbol of a plane of existence that I'm at loss to depict in a drawing?  I don't know, but somehow, I get a good feeling of hope from my pregnant, cart hauling, aimed upward, winged Billy Goat.  He isn't the goat that is associated with the Devil, no way.  Maybe its my own personal spin on drawing an angel.  An animal angel.

Where there is flesh of the Godly Fates I used a lot of pink tones.  Where there is flesh of those that have died, I have used tones of green and blue and brown.

I asked my husband, "Why are their holes in the women's breasts?"  and without hesitation he replied "Because they lack the milk of human kindness."

But my husband does not understand why all the dead people's faces have unhappy looks on them.  "Sometimes you say you want to die" he said to me.  "If you want to die, shouldn't the faces in death be happy?  Because you got what you want?"  He continued on this line of thought.  "I think because the faces look unhappy, you really don't want to die, even when you say so."

I got a notion that repeated itself to me while planing and executing this drawing.  I kept thinking that the drawing was different from preceding work.  And that the difference was because I was showing early stages of Alzheimer's.

Now, reality check.  Do I have any sort of problems with my memory?  No, absolutely not.  Still, I kept telling my husband, like a broken needle on a record, "It feels like I have Alzheimer's when I draw."  Do I know anyone with Alzheimer's?  No.  But what I was trying to express, I think, was that my thoughts felt blocked and slowed down.  Schizophrenia is a type of dementia, but I wanted to say that while making this art I felt like I had dementia on top of dementia.   Creative flow felt altered, and not in a good way.  It was my husband who pointed out to me that during the Christmas season I had gone up, a tiny bit, on my antipsychotic medication.  Just one extra 20mg pill a night.  The holiday time is a former time of hospitalization.  Its hard to remember, but I think I've had two hospitalizations right before Christmas.  So its a kinda a danger zone.  And since I was doing so well on the higher dose of medication I just kept on taking the increased dose.  More medication all throughout January.  During the planing and execution of this drawing. "Your probably really sensitive to how the medication alters your creativity." My husband said to me.  "It must be that you don't like the way the medication affects your creativity."

I have seen art transformed by Alzheimer's.  I think there was an unconscious reason I picked this disease to describe how I felt.

A couple of years ago I read a very good and detailed biography of the abstract expressionist painter Willem De Kooning.  When De Kooning was at his best his work has intense energy and vitality.  At the end of his life De Kooning had Alzheimer's so bad he stopped speaking.  I suppose that's part of the normal course of Alzheimer's.   At this point in his life, when a paintbrush was put in his hand (oh, they were trying to get him to paint right up to the very end, he was so bankable) - all he would paint on canvas was a circle.  The story of his art was all there for me to see in pictures in the book - early art training, decades of artistic searching, the mastery and breakthrough, and eventual pictorial dementia.  I HAVE SEEN AN ALZHEIMER'S PIECE OF ARTWORK.  WHEN I SAID MY WORK LOOKED LIKE I HAD ALZHEIMER'S, I WAS SENSITIVE TO A SUBTLE ALTERATION THAT MIMICKED EXISTING ALZHEIMER'S ARTWORK.  I BELIEVE THIS WAS BECAUSE OF A SMALL INCREASE IN ANTI-PSYCHOTIC MEDICATION.

When De Kooning was good, he was very good.  I especially liked his series of Women, who were ugly sexual goddesses (sometimes with teeth!) that dominated and made a strong subvocal statement to the viewer like  "I exist!  I am solid!  I am all woman! If you have sex with me I'll eat you whole and spit out your ribcage!".  The museum that I worked at in my youth had two de Koonings.   One was a delicate, somber, semi-realistic man relegated to the wall of a staircase (not an esteemed position).   The other painting was done after fame had arrived, in signature abstract expressionist style.  This painiting was far more advanced, in power and scope, and was one of the lynchpins of the 20th Century art wing of the museum.  So, in a way, I've had the several year experience of live contact with a massive, impressive de Kooning in addition to any of the illustrations of his work that I've seen in books.  

When Willem De Kooning started his abstract expressionist style of painting he pretty much became a success overnight.  He had been known in the artworld, lots of artist buddies, but not yet much noticed or talked about by the art critics.  The trajectory of his talent proves to me that for some artists, they must spend decades of searching before they find the style that exudes power and creative grace.  Van Gogh is another other example of an artist who trained and searched before he became a master.  Most people agree that Van Gogh was a creative genius.  Yet I own a two volume complete set of reprints of his work, and for the first ten years he was painting he was nothing more than an average painter (sometimes a horrible painter!). Early Van Gogh had some definite flops.  A Van Gogh flop?  You bet.  For some artists, it takes years of practice and dedication to get to the point where they exhibit the unearthly powers of a creative genius.  At the end of his life Van Gogh made a masterpiece every day.  You can be born with talent, maybe even genius, but not many are genius prodigies, obvious and known at a young age.  Often there is a learning curve before the artistic miraculous happens.  In America the myth is that fame and fortune happens virtually overnight (on American Idol?)  and we forget that for some creative stars there is muckcrawling and unrewarded practice for a long time.  Slogging away in darkness before the light shines.  And when that light shines, the artist truly becomes themselves.  Unique and like no other.  That's when the art world notices the talent; when the artist breaks with history and finds a signature style.

De Kooning had a wife named Elaine who the biographer that wrote my book didn't like very much.  If you encounter her on Wikipedia, they seem to be very nice to her.  They name her among the greats of the abstract expressionist movement.  I think this is a weird lie - I've never seen any work by her.   I prefer to believe the author of my book.  He never pays attention to her art.  The DeKooning marriage wasn't much of a success.  They both went on to have affairs and stop living with one another.  Yet they never divorced.  Elaine liked being married to a famous artist and she especially liked big money.   She was a mouth piece in the art world and high society promoting her husband's work.  When he started showing signs of dementia, she covered it up as best she could.  She got him assistants sworn to secrecy.  She moved him permanently out of New York City to an isolated studio Willem had designed and built the country.  Elaine did not want the high prices his works commanded to deflate.  Afterall she was his wife and entitled to a large share of his income.  Elaine promoted the visual change in Willem's art as a next step in the evolution of a master painter.   It was true that up till then  DeKooning's trajectory had always been one of evolution.  At a point in the 1980's the look of De Kooning's work definitely changed.  The abstraction in the paintings became very fluid.  Looking a bit like it had been smoothly poured in patches.  Much different from earlier paint that was broken, gestural, interwoven, fast and furious.  In late De Koonings forms of color floated serenely.  The colors were all separated from one another.  There was new peace and order in the paintings.  The dementia phase work was wholly abstract, with no subtle reference what-so-ever to any object in reality.  In my museum's De Kooning there was a pair of lips.  A lot of abstraction but a definite nod as well to a red pair of feminine lips.  The late De Kooning canvasses were still interesting - that's probably why the value held.  De Kooning's illness was relegated to rumor - but a definite departure in style had occurred.

I swear that half way through this drawing, when all the white of the paper had been eradicated by a first layer of oil pastel , I felt such a violent rejection of my creation that I wanted to destroy the artwork.  What stopped me was all the time and effort that had already gone into the piece.  I did reason with myself.   Feeling violent disgust toward my own creation is something I've wrestled with before.  Artwork has been destroyed, much to my later regret.  So no matter the dark impulses I was feeling I had to finish it.  I can't do much about my perception of my artwork.  However, I can suspect it.  I don't trust it.  One day I can like a work, another day looking at the work fills me with self loathing and a feeling of failure.  Usually when I finish an artwork, and I look at the thing done, it makes me feel crazy.  Completed work seems so energized that my sensibilities can't tolerate it.  That's always a current reaction to any work done on low dose of anti-psychotics. I like it, but I can't bare to stare at it.

I know that the disease of schizophrenia alters self awareness, and most importantly, self perception.  I don't have problems with grandiosity.  Instead I can be visited (this usually doesn't last longer than a day or two)  a rather horrible sense of self regard.  I recently had a day of darkness when I remarked to my husband, "I am shredding myself.  Cutting myself up inside and making me bleed by self condemnation.  What a horrible, unnecessary thing to do to oneself."

When I finish any piece of artwork I take a picture and email it to friends and family.  The support, and liking of this drawing has been strong and positive.  My mom really liked it.  She asked that since it seemed to her to be so creative, had I recently gone DOWN on my medication? (There was so much irony and humor in this question I almost didn't believe I had heard the comment correctly.)  However, I will make one small observation about my Mother.  She likes works done on a lot of medication.  She is distinctly troubled by low dose medication artwork.  I think they confuse and alarm her.  She has said to me, with all intended kindness, "I'm trying hard to understand your new style."  I have noticed that the art she enjoys living with, decorating her home, is light, happy, simple, and straightforward.  Mass media art.  My artwork that she owns is mostly crammed into the smallest room in the house.  This room used to be a pantry for canned goods.  My brother's realistic painting of three potatoes has a place of honor over the table in her large kitchen.  So a picture of three potatoes is what my mom prefers to look at.  I have been directly asked by my mother not to gift her anymore artwork. 

If you want to compare two works of art on two different doses of medication (and make your own opinion about the effects of medication on art), compare the picture of the last post to the picture of this essay.  They were both done on the same size of paper, 22"x 30".  You can click on the image to see it enlarged.  January's post drawing is the paper held horizontal.  February's post is the same paper held vertical.  Last month's drawing, "Love is Complicated" was conceived on 60mg Geodone.  I was happy with it when it was finished.  This month's drawing, "End of Life" was conceived on 80mg of Geodone.   While as a honest critic I see "End of Life" has solid elements of innovation, composition, and meaning, - I still feel a much looser and less passionate connection to it. I feel its me, but too, it isn't me.  And for some reason, that pisses me off. 

When I went up on medication several things happened to my personality.  I became less critical of my husband.  Whenever he said something I disagreed with there was less of a tiff.  More medication meant a more serene, agreeable me.   And formerly, every night, I had felt a darkness.  Sadness, despair, and hurt once the sun went down.   Mornings were good, but evenings, right before I took my daily dose of medication medication (with dinner - food activated the medicine) were often horrible.  On the higher dose of medication my mood stayed more constant and pleasant.  And on the higher dose of medication there has not been one incident when I said things that make no sense.  No more "everyone in the world is laughing at me", no more "everyone in the world wants to kill me", and no more strange observations like "I think I'm made out of sugar and onions."  What did happen each month, on both doses of medication, I lost the ability to speak.  It really doesn't matter how much medication I'm on, occasionally I will loose the ability to speak.  There are ways to communicate, but never with words.  And even on oodles of medication I've gotten to the point where I could not speak or move, frozen in place.  Usually that happens after a period of tremendous stress and physical activity - sensory overload.  So no amount of medication can prevent the occasional occurrence of catatonia.

Actually, there is a lot less catatonia on low medication.  But there is a lot more of what my husband calls "the scalpel".  This is critical thinking that will not tolerate any lies, fabrication, or long winded stories in conversation.  Low medication Karen wants the truth, straight forward and simple in conversation.  I'll cut with a scalpel to the chase.  No head games.  Once the scalpel is out, I will not tolerate head games.  I think this includes a diminished ability to appreciate humor.  An increase, perhaps, of concrete black and white thinking?  More medication and I'm much more light-hearted.  Less medication and I'm more mean, critical, sarcastic and biting in conversation.  My husband's dreaded "scalpel".   

My marriage was smoother, and happier, this past month while I made this artwork!  A noticeable difference!  However, my consistent distress over making artwork that I did not feel for some reason emotionally attached to (the complaint of Alzheimer'! Strange wonderment -  it feels like I now have Alzheimer's!) caused my husband to make a sudden pronouncement last weekend.  "Go back down to 60mg" he said.  "Its ok with me."

So now I'm on day 3 at 60mg.  I'm drawing everyday, planning my next piece.  But I think too I'm a little weirder, meaner, more unhappy person. I got an email from a male friend yesterday.  "You keep talking about boobs.  What is it with boobs?"  Ah yes, the return of obsessional thinking.

But I'm happy again and feel connected to my drawing.

I feel a dawn and rebirth of things not of this world.  But all said and done, the drawing on this post is still very odd.

I never stopped being the DEADLY SERIOUS IDIOT.

A Schizophrenic Love Drawing

The images for this drawing came completely from my unconscious mind.  I didn't look at photographs or other artwork for inspiration.  First I drew separate images in a sketchbook.  Then I assembled them into a whole.  I made my separate sketching form a narrative.   This is not a straight forward realistic story.  It is a symbolic story. And it feels exactly right and true.  I call this 22"x30" oil pastel drawing "Love is Complicated".  It is a story about me, my life, my marriage.  And what the condition of love feels to me.  It took about a month to make.  Click on the image to see it enlarged.

The man is my husband.  He is pregnant with a saint in his belly.  I think very highly of my husband.  He has traits of a saint within him. And he can be an arrogant dickhead.  But most of the time, he is happy and nice.  He tries to be good.

The girl is me, lovingly entwined with her inner beast. People do have layers to them, the outer and the inner.  The gun, the potential shot, the erect penis, the hole that is essential to every woman, animal passion, both man and women smiling, - this is all very sexual imagery.  I think I see in this drawing the state of my marriage bed.  In schizophrenic art I don't usually see much sexual imagery.  Hardly any nudes.  No reference much to any type of relationship between people.  I assume that this is because sex, and schizophrenia, don't go well together.   My two best schizophrenic friends have had sex in the past, but currently, they do not.  One has been celibate for over twenty five years.  The other would like to have a girlfriend.  But he is in a very isolated living situation.  And I don't know if his nature would ever be able to weather the complications that emotional intimacy brings.  He has never had a long term relationship or been in a romantic relationship where the emotion of love is present.  I think the illness brings with it a sense of isolation to the sufferer.  Usually the isolation is self-protective.

I notice that I'm not built well to sustain strong emotions.  After experiencing a strong emotion sometimes I am catatonic for a bit.  Other times the world get really dark.  I am always emotionally fragile after sex.  Sex can be happy and passionate in our marriage, but on some level, it always wounds me.  It doesn't matter that the only emotion that was present during sex was love and passion.  I still emerge wounded.  Not on my outer manifestation, but inwardly.  

The pink bird bites its claw and makes the shape of the eternal circle.  The bird cannot fly, it is shackled and earth bound.  I think the bird is a symbol of the Love within my marriage.  The love between my husband and I is eternal, a trap, capable of flight yet going nowhere, rather pretty, purposely self consuming, very self absorbed.  So my loving marriage is complicated.  I think my husband and I do not have a lifestyle that most couples have.  As much as possible, we are in retreat from the world.  We are very sensitive to one another and small mishaps, small criticisms, can easily wound.  At our worst, we have both felt "gutted" by the other.  We currently do not understand how a harsh remark can so easily damage self esteem.  Are we both, in separate ways, equally fragile?  Are we so intensely hooked in to the other's psyche?  We do not call ourselves soulmates.  But we would like to be with each other until we die.  It will be hard for the one who remains.

I have been assured time and time again by others who have had long term successful marriages that marriage requires hard work.  Easily, love is both painful and sweet.

In the last conversation I had with my father he asked me, "Why are the mentally ill so obsessed with their illness?"  No doubt he was thinking of me.  But the best schizophrenic art, I think, like the self consuming suffering schizophrenic, turns inward into the depths of the psyche for subject matter and form.  My schizophrenia on a daily basis falls into patterns of wellness and relapse.  I move from hour to hour feeling well or not well.  This scenario can easily happen - a fun active, productive morning, and then an evening where I can't move from my bed and proclaim with anguish "I am in hell and life has no meaning".   But I'll be well again and chipper the next morning.  I make art when I'm not suffering.  But no doubt, even when I feel normal, psychotic thought is denaturing and re-arranging logical thought.  Highly creative and schizophrenics can and do make unlikely connections.  That's the footprint of psychosis.  I don't think that this is a comfortable drawing.  I do not think that this a drawing that a sane artist would make.  And most certainly, I don't think that this drawing has anything typical of the romantic, social, ideal of Love.  It has more in common with the workings of the unconscious mind than what has been produced during the course of art history by artists expounding on the theme of Love.  Nobody likes to think of Love as I have portrayed it.  I'm out of the social norm. And frankly, I have no interest in depicting the social norm.  That would be a very boring image for me.  And it would feel as though it were a lie.

Some schizophrenics paint landscapes.  Landscapes with realistic looking grass, trees and flowers.  But for a schizophrenic, especially one not medicated, such subject matter is rare.  What most schizophrenics want to put in their art is an interior landscape.  A reality from within.  A genesis of unconscious conclusions and ways.  In order to make a picture we don't look out our bedroom window.  We look inward to what the disease makes us obsessed with.

It is scary how dependent I am on my husband.  

Christmas Delusion Card

I had a choice this Christmas.  Do I send my family politically correct Christmas cards?  I could choose to draw an angel.  Angels are  harmless, bring joy, and are politically correct.  Or do I follow my strong creative impulse and draw pregnant beasties for Christmas?  Goats with horns with the sainted child growing inside their belly?  When in doubt, and most certainly with my husband's Evangelical Christian family, send an angel.  But my brother and my husband's boss asked for a pregnant beastie drawings.  They were the only people I trusted enough to ask which version they would prefer.  And my husband wanted a pregnant beastie for a Christmas Present.  I've taken pictures of his gifts - threw in an angel Christmas Present just to be nice.  He is my greatest fan.  Frankly, I had more fun drawing pregnant beasties than angels.

I had a problem with some slight insanity one evening.  I emailed my friend that I was going to drown. Not that I wanted to drown, just that I thought it would happen.   I did say that drowning didn't make any sense because I wasn't going swimming,(it being winter), and that anyway I am an excellent swimmer.   And while I was not worried that I would drown, nor did I think it a possibility that in reality I would drown, however, I had to assert, (say it out loud) that most certainly I was going to drown.  So I told my husband a couple of times that I was going to drown and then I sent an email to my friend.  My sign off on that drowning email was this separate line;

"The Billy Goat is pregnant."

That single nonsense sentence the next day turned into an image for the Christmas cards I was in the process of making.  Now, I have enough sense to know that there are members of my family, especially on my husband's side, who would probably stop talking to me if I sent them a Christmas Card with a pregnant Billy Goat.  My husband did have to point out to me that the Goat is an old symbol of the devil.  I likely already knew that.  However, I was not thinking about the devil or any symbol when I wrote "The Billy Goat is pregnant".  It just came to me.  And I wasn't trying to be funny, or creative, or playful - I think I meant it quite literally.   In some weird way it was true when I wrote it.  And the idea followed me into my art.  Do I know any Billy Goats?  No.  We live near a town.  However, I know schizophrenia tends to make a person a concrete thinker.  There are many signs in my conversations with my husband that I talk literal sense, and have trouble, with understanding abstract insinuations.  The pregnant Billy Goat was so real to me that I felt compelled to draw it.  I guess this is art expressing a psychotic thought.

Cliches drive me nuts.  Cliches are commonly used phrases that make no literal sense.  They only hint broadly at things.  You are supposed to know the secret meaning behind a cliche.  I especially hate it when what is meant is really the opposite of what is literally said. Social stock phrases make me so confused.  When my husband uses a cliche I'll stop him and say things like "that doesn't mean anything" or "your talking garbage" or "this is empty talk".  At first he said that everyone at work talks with cliches and everyone gets the insinuation of the cliche user.  So normal people can process this type of communication and not get confused.  I understand I'm other.  Usually when I get confused in a conversation I also get angry.  I hate it when my husband says to me "this funny thing happened at work".  I say wait!  Do you mean this is ironic, and something really sad and pathetic happened but you are instead calling it "funny"?  That happened just yesterday.  My husband stopped a very confused co-worker from being taken advantage of by her health insurer.  And he wants to call this near disaster "funny"?  Apparently people do this all the time, call horror stories, "funny" and my husband has gotten into the habit.  I hate waiting to listen for humor and instead get this story of pathos, the woe of the human condition.  It is not funny!  It is usually sad.....................so why should I get so angry when I am misled by the inherent vagaries and flip-flog meaning of social remarks?  I guess being being confused is really scary to me................my husband says I think in black and white terms and have trouble understanding the grey areas of morality.  Sins are, I will admit, complex, with layers of meaning and intent.  When my husband says stuff that are half truths or mis-directions I pretty much know.  I catch tone of voice maybe?  And I'll nag until I get honesty from him.

Once my husband said to me "you are the most honest person I've ever met".  And I said oh honey, don't put me on a pedestal, it isn't something wonderful and elevated, - its just schizophrenic brain damage.

I can't play a lot of the social games that other people play.  One day my husband came home from work and told me that he had an odd sense that day that everyone around him was either lying and telling falsehoods to make themselves look good, or else living in delusions in which they were mistakenly lying to themselves.  Of course he wouldn't have been in that frame of mind if he wasn't married to Mrs. strick-litteral-translation lady.

If I had used a pregnant Billy Goat instead of an angel from most people I would get no compassionate pass for artistic whimsicality.  Nobody would say "oh, she's just an eccentric artist with a mental illness".  Rather, the Christians in my family would probably talk amongst themselves and come to the conclusion that either I was possessed by a devil or else worshiping the devil.  And they might fear, really fear, who their son or brother had married.  Worst case scenario I would would be immediately shunned.  Best case scenario they would think I would need some powerful prayer and holy healing.  I have had, in the past, a schizophrenic friend say that there might be a demon in me because of my artwork.  But normal people too believe in demons.

Christmas is a time when people take what is correct, and what is not correct, pretty seriously.  Don't mess with Christmas traditions!  No alternate interpretations!  A shop owner here in town put in her shop window a scantly clad plastic model seated in the lap of a red costumed Santa.  The town told her to change her window.  A grown woman in Santa's lap was politically incorrect.   Only children in Santa's lap are politically correct.

Even people who get an angel probably think I'm deranged for not drawing a "realistic" looking angel.

Its hard to draw with oil pastels.  They are fat sticks, smooshable, and blend easily.

A lot of people think you are only making good art if its realistic looking art.  My art for these cards looks pretty childlike I think.  Oh, and I've read an expert who said it is incorrect that schizophrenics draw like children.  He wished to elevate and dignify schizophrenic art.  Are schizophrenic people sophisticated?

Ha!  I'm sure as hell not sophisticated when I say I'm made out of sugar and onions.

Nor am I sophisticated when I say that they are hiding chocolate in underground missile silos.

And when I yell, "The rats are coming, the rats are coming!" obviously, someone has to be really, really nice to me.  It can't be good if the rats are coming.

My pregnant Billy Goat would communicate directly to the unconscious mind because I think it came directly from the unconscious mind.

But Christmas is so codified, that tampering with tradition is tantamount to evil.  One can only be creative with Christmas in the narrowest of terms.

But I'm not an evil schizophrenic, I'm a pretty innocent schizophrenic.  Its just that an image with a psychotic source is so powerful, and speaks so swiftly, that it can disturb mightily.  ESPECIALLY AT CHRISTMAS!

New Weird Thoughts

This is all I can post of the painting I just finished.  You can't have the painting in its entirety.  I'm giving you chopped up pieces of the whole. Click on them to see them enlarged.   They're pretty detailed.   I don't think Google would like my images of animals having sex. Edited out are two dogs having sex (the groom holds the leash of the male dog - look at the groom smirk - he knows whats coming.  The bride seems serious, maybe a little incredulous.  She hasn't a clue or notion about what carnal lust is).   Two monkey's having sex, and of all the impossible things, a lion and a crocodile having sex.  Inter-species sex?  No, its gay sex!  You can see both the yellow lion and the green crocodile have pink penises!  Of course what exactly I painted is the most primitive rendering.  What am I capable of?  Not too much in the way of depicting reality. Its not like I copied a photograph of animal's copulating.  But the painting was about marriage, sex and relationships.  I titled it "The Virgin's Fate".  It amuses me that both my mother and my husband's mother were virgins when they married our fathers.  My mother's parents even picked out her wedding gown.  They were Lithuanian Lutherans, very European, very old school traditional.   They made my mother look like Cinderella, even had her wear a rhinestone encrusted tiara.  My father was in medical school and didn't want children at the time so they used birth control.  But my husband's folks were game for the whole wet, squirming, bundle-of-joy consequences of their honeymoon.  My husband was born almost exactly ten months after the marriage day. 

Well, when I started this whole long journey of lowering my medication my medication nurse made horrible predictions about what I would turn into.  Most things, almost all things, have not happened. She doesn't know me that well.   She absolutely has not been with me since the start of my journey of mental illness.   She was merely extrapolating from what she had seen happen to other people in my diagnosis group.  But I am unique, my schizophrenia is unique.  This diagnosis covers a whole variety of types of people, with varying severity of illness.  Schizophrenia has to have room in it for people who are atypical. 

Recently my medication nurse offered to lower my medication to one 20mg pill a day.  A miniscule amount.   That shows how well she thinks I am doing.  I currently take 60mg Geodone.  Theraputic dose of Geodone starts at 120mg.  One thing she said in her predictive rant when we started the lowering of my medication is that psychosis will come.  It may take a year, two years, even three years, but it will come.  She said its part of my genetics.  I think that the little medication I take is protective against psychosis, and more importantly to me, mania. If psychosis will come, so will mania, if I'm unprotected.   I met a bi-polar woman who was protected against mania only by antipsychotic medication.  She thought it was very weird that she was not being treated by any of the classical mood-disorder drugs.  But this was the approach of her doctor, and the antipsychotic meds did stop her mania.  I've been on the mood stabilizer Depakote and I hated it - and I wasn't even creating art at the time.  So I rather take an antipsychotic and just prevent the mania from ever developing.  When I did experience mania, usually it was very mild.  When I discribed it to a professor in college he said that I was having religious experiences.  But long ago, before my first defining breakdown, I noticed that it was rhythmic.  The hypomania started and stopped.   But eventually there was the breakdown where I had full-blown psychosis and complete inability to sleep.  I'm glad I've go no signs of hypomania.  I believe that is due to the Geodone antipsychotic.  I'm not lowering my antipsychotic med for this reason, and now, for another reason.  I have had totally new, weird thoughts.

It always happens when I'm under abnormal stress.   I will have an insistent, weird thought.  Three separate months, three separate weird thoughts.  They don't last longer than a day.  A textbook psychotic thought.  Maybe.  It seems pretty much like what one would find in a textbook.  At the time I know that what I'm thinking is ridiculous.  Outrageous.  However, there is real emotional distress accompanying these close brushes with psychosis.  Even when its recognized as nonsense, (and I know weirdness when I see it - I've always been a keen observer of my own madness), the weird thought is hard to bear.  Once, to stop the thought, I took extra medication.  That worked very well.  The two other times I normalized after a good night's sleep. 

The first weird thought happened during an August vacation.  We go to Maine, to a little fishing village where both my father and mother have separate homes.  We stay with my mother.  She has an apartment over her garage.  While visiting my mother I feel obliged to inform my father that I'm in the same town as him and arrange a visit.

Historically I've been in the worst shape after visits with my father.  For many, many years after each visit I became suicidal.  Its not just me.  In the nineteen nineties my sister did not talk to my father for three years because he made her feel suicidal. Now their relationship is ok.  She likes to call him for medical advice.  Mom says she affectionately calls him "Daddy-O".  I think she's one tough cookie.  Its cool to see a sibling heal and strengthen that much.

In the past, after a visit with my father, while traveling home in the car, I would dope myself with medication.  While traveling I would still would feel suicidal for a bit, but I was so zoned out from the meds that there was an air of "who cares about anything in life?".  Now on less antipsychotic medication my father does not make me feel suicidal.  I just feel terrible, torn up inside.  And I can't stop re-living the visit.  Obsession.  Last Thanksgiving I talked about the visit for about three days straight and my husband said "enough, I have no more sympathy for you.  I don't want you to ever see your father again."   How does my husband deal with my father?  He falls asleep.  Like, is there such a thing as pathological sleepiness?  My husband does not wish to be conscious around my father.  So he dozes, anypalce, anychair, everytime.

During the August vacation my father invited me over for lunch.   I medicated myself an hour before hand with an extra antipsychotic pill and a tranquilizer.  At the lunch table I felt a vale of dopiness disconnecting myself from my father, and I thought to myself, it is a good thing I'm zonked, otherwise I would have so much anxiety.  I look at my father and I wish to scream, how could I eat my lunch?  But I did eat lunch.   After lunch we moved to the sun porch.  My husband fell asleep.  My Dad and I talked about art.  I relaxed.   I remember saying that all my heroes in art were mad and lived in insane asylums.  Then I said say what you will about my art, (I'm not certain how to rate it at all in terms of good or bad or beautiful) - but at least it is honest.  Where did the boast about honesty come from?  I do not know.  But it felt right at the moment.  My Dad said that this word honesty, in connection with art, he had read several times in books.  He does not know what it means.  Could I explain what it means?  To have honest art?   I couldn't explain.  Probably to discuss this term, and its application to art, I would have to reveal too much about my creative process.  And I know what my father thinks of my art.  I know the truth.  He thinks I'm a sad case.  Maybe even as much as a painful embarrassment.  I had a therapist tell me once that my father will never be proud of me, no matter where my art goes or what good things happen to it.  The only emotion that possibly can be summoned, with artistic success, is jealousy.  The therapist seems kinda mean.  I rather view my father as a complicated person.  Capable of many feelings on many levels.  But knowing that probably my art upsets my Dad, do I really want to try to put myself in a virtuous light?  It would seem like a battle that I've already lost.   I know I'm rejected because my art looks different from mainstream art, and because my father is art school trained and I am not, and because my father seems to lack the ability to recognize creativity in art.

His inability to recognize things that are creative is a new discovery and it explains a lot.  I have a term for people who are bushwacked by fame.  I call them fame fuckers.  My father is a fame fucker because he only can tolerate and judge as successful art that has critical acclaim.  The lightbulb went off in my head when two vacation's ago he handed me a post card with an artwork on it advertizing an art show.  Dad said, "He's good, isn't he?"  And he told me that the artist was a former dean of an art school who now is independent and very successful.  I believe I heard envy and esteem in my father's voice.  He likes good credentials.  But the picture on the postcard was horrible.  Totally boring.  A small boat in a large body of water.  No real content, no color surprises.  A field of emptiness with a poorly rendered object in it.   I assumed at the time that the original artwork must have been very delicately tinted and much was lost in the printing process.  It puzzled me why an artist would pick a work that reproduced so poorly.  And then I realized that my Dad liked the image because the artist was successful.  A fame fucker. Unable to judge quality for himself, and giving quality where it is not deserved via the uplift and aura of fame.  This is intellectual distortion and bushwacking of judgement.  Creativity is delicate.  It's presence more like a fragrance.  I think I rather stay safe, and was silent after my father asked me to explain artistic honesty to him.  And so he took the break in the conversation as the perfect moment to say "Well, I'm going to go paint".  He stood.  He smiled, and he walked away.  And that ended the visit.   He had not seen or talked to me for nine months.  I did feel, at that moment, the sly sensation that my father was running away from me!  I felt like I was too much of a goofball to be taken seriously and perhaps, I did not have the ability to talk about art like my father's other artist friends.  I know he has a lot of artist friends who visit his Maine cottage, stay overnight, and go on painting trips with him.  I must not be able to talk about art like a normal person. And I think socializing with me makes my father nervous.  He can never predict what is going to come out of my mouth.  I once heard from a nurse who worked with him that during a meeting he went totally ballistic when another doctor called him eccentric.  He yelled and left the room. On a gut level, he hates eccentric.

The next morning I woke early.  And this idea was in my brain.  "My parents attack, kill and eat me".  They do this and somehow I am reassembled, I survive, only again, at a future date, to be the living victim for them to "attack, kill and eat me".  It seemed to be a pattern that has been going on my whole life.  Torture, death, dismemberment, and regeneration.  Perhaps the criminal punishment of Prometheus chained to his rock, having his liver eaten daily by an eagle? What Chronos did to his children? To put the little Godlings away and keep them down.   (How I love Goya's savage painting of Saturn eating his child).   A very primitive notion, this, the parents killing and eating their child.  A myth of death and rebirth in the collective unconsciousness?  I started to cry, woke my husband, and held him tight, repeating over and over that my parent both want to "attack, kill, and eat me".

That day we went to an antique store.  In degrees, my agitation died down.  The next day we spent driving, traveling home.  I then said to my husband that I remembered what I thought the day before, however in the light of a new day, its degree of insistence and reality was so diminished that I could not comprehend why I said what I said, or believed it was so impregnated with reality.

The second weird thought occurred in early October.  My husband and I had had three fights within the space of one week.  After a fight I always go and sleep on the couch in my art room.   After most fights we work things out in the morning.  My will husband take the time to reconcile before he goes to work.  After a good nights rest our emotions are so much calmer.  And it is far far easier to say I'm sorry.  For both of us.  But after the third fight he made no attempt at reconciliation.  That day, quite suddenly, in the middle of the day, I emailed my friend.  All I wrote is "Nobody loves me, I'm persecuted, everyone wants to kill me".  Naturally my friend did not take me at my word.  I had never written such a thing.

It was so strange to think that everyone, every living being on the planet wished to kill me.  When the thought first came I ignored it as best I could.  I believed it rightly preposterous.  Having absolutely no basis in reality.  Six hours later, still thinking this thought, my spirit began to flag.  Even imaginary ill will is still ill will.  And one small human being can not stand against the notion that nobody wishes them alive.  "Everybody wants to kill me" had over the six hours become an obsessive mantra.  I didn't hear a voice say it, but my internal imagination repeated its body of meaning again and again and again.  Eventually it frightened me (was I now starting to believe that there was some truth in it?  Not that I would be attacked by guns, but that everyone wished me dead) and I took an extra Geodone pill.   After about 40 minutes the thought completely disappeared.  Like magic.  The Geodone definitely put me in a medicated haze that felt mildly uncomfortable.  My husband came home from work and we ironed things out domestically.  I had a good nights sleep.  And a very productive day painting for many hours the next day.

The last weird thought happened last week, the first week of November.  A specific unusual situation had been left unresolved.  I did not know what another person was thinking about me.  Their opinion seemed to matter.  I could only anticipate a negative solution to the encounter.  My email buddy said that the universe had a plan for me and I had to just flow with the plans of the universe.  Good advice.  But at night I would obsess.  My husband listened to me go on and on on the same topic and eventually he asked rather angrily what kind of solutions I could come up with to counteract my obsessive thinking.  He wanted me to problem solve (he wished me to shut up) because I had become unpleasant company.   And then suddenly, the pressure of worry and not knowing disappeared.  I thought I knew what was happening.   I was being laughed at.  This is how another person sees me.  They laugh at me.  No mystery.  I had this bit of incredulous awe that I could see what was happening far far away.  A stranger was laughing at me.  Well, it was a relief not to obsess anymore and I fell asleep.

The next morning I woke and my perceptions had altered just a little bit.  Before my husband went to work I told him that now I thought that the whole world was laughing at me.  Everyone in the world was laughing at me behind my back.  I could see the pattern that I liked to generalize an idea to include the whole population of the world - be it killing or laughing.  And I could see that it was again, preposterous and a figment of my imagination. It absolutely made no sense that anyone should be laughing at me.  I said to my husband, you wanted me to stop obsessing over my trouble, and the trouble has disappeared, but it has been replaced by a psychotic idea.  You can't suppress the mind.   Last night you wanted me to change. Well I've changed.  Maybe a part of me listened to your angry admonishment.  But do you think the change is in a good direction?

It was easy to promise my husband before he left for work that if the thought that the whole world was laughing at me did not go away and if it built in any sort of intensity, then I would take extra Geodone.  For peace of mind.  It worked well with the other weird thought the month before.  But I wanted to draw before I took the Geodone.  Take advantage of a mind unfettered before chemical chains are applied.  I felt the winds of creativity sweep through me and while it was hard to draw, (I almost had too much energy and distress to focus)  I am very very happy with the new form I invented.  It is heavily ironic that so much distress produced something that will be so very valuable for the painting I am planning. Amazingly, drawing for three hours cured me of the thought that the whole world was laughing at me.  When I was finished my morning stint of drawing for the day the thought had completely disappeared. 

But I was still a little restless.  So I walked to a local cafe and had a bowl of homemade soup.

Most of the time my life is predictable.  But I seem not to react well to stress.  These new, weird thoughts are a sign of my mind breaking down. And then when they go away my mind is much healthier.  And happier.   My schizophrenic best friend who hears voices has a lot of weird thoughts.  Like constantly, she obsesses over weird thoughts.  Weird thoughts torment her.  Why must the weirdness be tormenting?

I understand that weird thoughts go with the territory of a schizophrenic type diagnosis.

In Pursuit of Creativity

                        "PARADISE", 2010  

     "ADAM, EVE, AND THE DEVIL", 2012

              "TEA TIME", 2013

I am schizoaffective, badly disabled, and I have devoted my life to making oil paintings.  Two years ago I started lowering my antipsychotic medication for health reasons.  I believe that my art changed.  I believe that I am more creative on lower medication.  Seeing my art change has motivated me to stay on very little medication despite some serious mental discomfort from symptoms of my illness.

I feel that I am closer to insanity, yet more creative.  I have shown you work to compare.

"Paradise" was created on a high dose of anti-psychotic medication.  Two anti-psychotic medications in fact.  The planning of this work was difficult.  I struggled to find images. I found the final product slightly unusual, but mostly bland.

"Adam, Eve, and the Devil" and "Tea Time" were both created as my medication was cut drastically.  They both are at a point where I have dipped under therapeutic level of only one antipsychotic medication.   They are both twice the size of  "Paradise".  As I planned these pieces the creative ideas came much more quickly to my mind.  Newness of form, newness of concept, appeared in my mind like magic.  I could "see" images in my imagination with clarity like never before.  I could paint twice as many hours a day.   Probably I like the highly detailed style in these low-dose medication artwork more because I sense a pulse of chaos in them.  I sense energy.  It is the chaos and energy of a mind that has been released to much more of the madness within.  I am now much more fascinated with my creation.  Pleased as an artist, this reinforced in the identity of being an artist and boosted self-esteem.  Freed from the foggy high dose of anti-psychotic medication my whole life, as I lived it day to day, was filled with more energy.  I felt sharper and smarter.  My husband noted that my ability to articulate ideas, and have critical thinking, drastically improved on low dose medication. 

Socially I became more withdrawn and isolated as the medication was lowered, slowly, bit by bit.  My emotions became more volatile.  My husband had to adjust to a person who was in his words "less childlike", who slept less, was more emotionally fragile, and who saw more reasons and causes to be distressed.  I no longer cared about attending social events in my town and there are days at a time that I never leave the apartment.  I lie in bed a lot, unable to stand other than to go to the bathroom.  Family interactions affected me negatively me more than ever and I obsess over emotional hurts in the past and the present.  However, I believe that isolation and obsessiveness are necessary to create works of art that are different and unique from mainstream subject matter. 

Often, in American review of Outsider Art, European schizophrenic artists who lived in insane asylums of the past are held up as examples of purity of vision and masters of creativity.  It has been noted by an New York University professor in a paper that she published on-line for her class, that the schizophrenic masters were not on medication.  Her thesis is that schizophrenic artists today who are on medication are incapable of creating work at the level of quality of past non-medicated schizophrenics.  Some schizophrenic artists who are put on anti-psychotic medication can't create art at all.  I believe that a lot of American schizophrenics do create art, but I have noticed myself that it is often not with consistency or idiosyncratic vision.  Vision that is bizarre and obsessive don't happen much to modern day schizophrenic artists.  I believe that they don't labor long on their creations, their delusions are not fueling the subject matter of the art in a subliminal way, and modern schizophrenics will expend a lot of energy participating in the little happinesses and diversions of mainstream society because of the medication they take.  I believe that more happiness means less top quality art.  This is not true for a normal artist, but it probably is true for a person with a severe mental illness.  

When I was young, I lived in a mental institution for two years.  I can testify that the conditions of life in the old style hospitals where humans were warehoused was so boring, that any mind that had the creative impulse would WANT to create, would be MOTIVATED to create, because LIFE WAS MONOTONOUS AND DULL.   What modern day medications give is a normalization of social interactions and connection to reality.  Now, to me as an artist, I find that these medical gifts of drug induced health divert my attention away from art making activities.  So I reject most gifts of medication and exist in a twilight state that parallels in condition, both mental and physical, of what I experienced being institutionalized young.  My life is simple.  It has to be moronically simple in order for me to have the concentration and motivation for what I make. 

I don't make art for fun.  I am not expecting life to be fun.  I make art for the sake of creating beauty.  Life for beauty.  Not life in the pursuit of happiness.  There's a difference.

I feel I was freed when I drastically lowered my medication and gave up on having any semblance of a normal, well rounded life.  And then I became an artist to the bone and core of my being.  I have embraced that my insanity is both a creative gift and a tormenting burden.  That's just a fact of my life, like my eyes are brown.  I have an off-kilter mentality and I'm not going to dull it down with medication.  I take just enough medication so that I'm not too tormented and try to kill myself.

Yes, making this choice is serious business.  But my life is my own to do with what I please.

Art School Disaster

I took an art class at a local art school.

After four sessions I had to quit.  I had to be able to tell myself that I was free, and could, if I wish, never return to class.  I had to be able to say, that although the sessions continued for all my classmates, for me it was over.  To say this to myself then gave me peace of mind.

Four classes was all it took, a two hour session of independent studio art on Monday and Friday, to lead me to total disintegration.  My husband and I had hoped that I would adapt to class, that I would adjust, that I would habituate myself.........................but instead, in the end, things almost wound up with a hospitalization.  Or something worse.  The end of it all.

I didn't really see it coming.  On the day of my fifth class I had trouble dressing in the morning.  This is a bad sign that my thinking is off.  For example I changed my clothing several times and took an hour figuring out which necklace to wear.  An hour changing necklaces is extremely pointless and more importantly, mentally exhausting.  It was a clue to bad things that I was well aware of.  Usually dressing is very easy. 

I decided not to go to class because I couldn't concentrate after all the clothing changes, and I needed to concentrate in order to draw.  I learned that if I'm not totally focused on my drawing my hearing becomes attuned to the conversations around me.  And when I listen to the other students, well, their normalicy makes me feel like a freak.  I get overly sensitive about my life and how I live it.  It is hard to listen to the happiness in other people's voices.  It is hard to listen to the places they travel to, to the ease in which they maneuver through society.  Education, jobs, cities, my Lord, how people with healthy minds are on the go.  Let me show you what I am dealing with.  The lady standing next to me one day painted a bunch of carrots, the next class she began radishes.  Her purpose, I hear her explain, was to go from vegetable to vegetable.  The teacher's loved her.  they spent a lot of time discussing the shading of these vegetables.  Colors too.  Lots of little stand-back observe huddles.  Meanwhile my drawing had a lady wearing Marc Jacob's couture, squatting,  lifting up her dress, and a stream of piss coming out of her.  Dripping and puddle clear to see.  In another part of the drawing a lady with odd growths on her spine holds a large gun to an angel's forehead.  Beneath the gun toting  Tilda Swinton (I used the actress's face), her skirt parts to reveal a box.  Inside the box is a demon blowing what looks like a french horn, his tail wrapped around a peg coming out of one ear of a decapitated head.  This head is dripping blood, echoing a little puddle of dribbled red just like the little puddle of dribbled yellow piss.  Oh yeah, I'm a natural for echoing shape and concept.   It just comes to me.  Look, I said to the teacher once, how the bird head and beak growing out of the angel feathers on her back exactly mimics her naked breast!

So I couldn't go to class because I knew that because of all the clothing changes my concentration was blown.  And little by little the guilt crept in.  The idea that because I missed class I was a failure.  I wanted to go to class but my malfunctioning head wouldn't permit it.  There is so much that I am not permitted.  What should a failing person do?  I thought maybe swallow all my tranquilizer pills.  Go to sleep and die.

I didn't really want to overdose, but my mind kept telling me that yes, I should overdose.  So I then thought I should walk down to the pharmacy where I get my medication and give all my tranquilizers to them, let them have the pills, and ask if going cold turkey on the stuff that probably I'm addicted to will cause seizures or something and land me in the hospital.  If they told me that taking back these pills was dangerous, that I couldn't possibly go cold turkey then I would just take my pills back and walk home.  If anyone asked me if I was suicidal the correct answer is NO.  If anyone asked me that I feared an overdose the correct answer is NO.  If anyone asked me why I was trying to give my pills back to the pharmacist the correct answer is because they have a street value and I didn't want anyone else getting them.  My only inquiry was what would happen if I simply stopped taking these pills, because I just don't want the pills.  No more answer than that, I just don't want the pills.

I did not go to the pharmacist.  I called my husband at work.  I told him I was thinking about taking an overdose of pills.  He has nice bosses, they let him leave immediately.  Inexplicably he stopped at the grocery store.  He bought chocolate ice cream and raspberries.  It was hard for me to understand this behavior.  Shouldn't he go where the danger is brewing immediately?  To my side?  But apparently he did not believe that he alone could talk me out of suicidal behavior, that somehow eating chocolate ice cream and raspberries would be a greater inducement to live than anything he could possibly offer.

At first it helped having him to talk to.  After I stopped feeling suicidal I sank into profound depression.  It scared me that maybe the next day I would wake being even more depressed.  I didn't know if there was a bottom to this depression, it came over me so fast and sudden like a switch being flipped.  So before my husband fell asleep I said that I've had my cry for help and it was heard.  Tomorrow I will be on my own and I must make a terrible decision, do it or not.  Really if they take all my pills away from me, or lock me up it isn't any good because there is a highway bridge nearby where two people have jumped to their deaths.  The second one took three hours to die.  But after a jump from such a height, death is certain.  If any person's behavior pushes me too far, if they manipulate me too much, I know how to easily leave this planet.  so, so many in the mental health fields have manipulated me in the past.  But I'm all grown up now.  I know the system, the choices, the outcomes.

But soon after thinking horrid thoughts about the next day (by now my husband was snoring next to me) I had a new thought.  The painting I'm working on isn't finished.  I CAN'T DIE LEAVING A PAINTING UNFINISHED.  NO MATTER THE GREIF, THE DEPRESSION, WHAT I THINK ABOUT MYSELF, I MUST WORK IT THROUGH AND ENDURE TO FINISH THE PAINTING. I MUST LIVE FOR THE PAINTING.  THIS IS NON-NEGOTIABLE.

So I went to sleep knowing that I wanted to live for one thing and one thing only.  But it must be life.  At least until the painting is finished.  It is estimated to be a seven month painting.  I'm probably in the fifth month.  I did wonder if my attitude would be better when the seventh month rolled around.  I tend to stagger paintings, so there is always one in the pipeline.  That drawing I just described is a plan for a painting.

The next morning I woke before my husband had left for work and I assured him that I would live through the day, and explained about the painting.  It makes me feel terribly sad that I can't live for the love and need of another human being.  My husband needs me terribly, and loves me greatly.  I'm his best friend.  Only I know all his secrets.  On a good day I can see how this works.  This thing of having your life interconnected with other people.  That feels really good.  But on a bad day, there is just the unfinished painting to live for the sake of.  I must be a monster.  Or at least terribly flawed.  I've had about twenty years of therapy.  Superficially I'm quite normal and connected to my family and the human race.  But I'm afraid that this is all just very good cover.  There are layers to me.  Like my husband has described, I seem like anyone else, I can make very very nice conversation, except underneath, I'm twisted.

So getting back to art school, what is traumatic about art school?

I don't like people looking at my work as I make it.  I'm too vulnerable when I draw.   Everything is coming from a very deep place.  It has to be made in private.  Even the teachers saying nice things (what could they say?  Only your arm holding the gun is too short.  Nothing about the woman pissing except that her arms were correct and her shoes looked good), nice things are intrusive and freak me out.  I know I'm drawing weird things.  I've got eyes.  One side of me the lady is painting vegetables, the other lady is painting from photographs of her grandchildren, and the other lady is painting a cat in flowers.  Do I have a neon sign over my head saying this is the disturbed freak in the room?

My private term for what exactly I am, my art style, my attitude toward life, everything summed up is DEADLY SERIOUS IDIOT.  I tried explaining it to my husband and he came up with Cervantes character of the old knight riding a nag attacking with a joust wind mills.  I guess he too was a DEADLY SERIOUS IDIOT.  I'm not a primitive painter, I'm not a visionary painter, I am not an outsider art painter, I'm a DEADLY SERIOUS IDIOT.

So, no more suicidal thoughts since I gave my self the permission never to return to class.  Or maybe the suicidal thought died when I realized that I must live to finish the painting.  Whatever the turnabout, each day I healed a little and the depression completely lifted - it only took three days.

Now I'm back to normal.

Been normal for several weeks.

Whatever normal is.