Drawing for "The Wedding Party"

This plan for a large scale painting took two months to make.  It is twice the size of any painting I've ever completed, 40"x30".  The planning for the painting I'm co-currently in the middle of, "Tea Time"  took two and a half weeks to plan and draw - so going for something much more ambitious at times scared me and felt to indeed sap me of all my strength.  But its done now, and a light pencil tracing has been transferred to canvas.  The transfer of the drawing took about 12 hours.  Click on any of the images to see them enlarged.

Here are some pictures reading the drawing clockwise.  First we have the bride and the groom.  The groom is holding onto the leash of two dogs, who are doing the very animalistic act which is planned for the couple's wedding night.  The groom is smirking in anticipation.  Behind the image is a repeating pattern.  This pattern repeats in stripes throughout the entire painting, it is the flat painting's background.  Pattern as background chosen over 3D perspective.   I've done a small oil paint study of this pattern, a tear drop lobe with two wings on either side.  In the study I was comparing subtle differences between thin and fat swirls.  I'm going to use the top looping, the lesser intrusive and slightly more delicate patterning.  There are three colors repeated in the background; cobalt blue, venitian red, and dark van dyke brown. 

In this finished tour of the drawing plan we see alternately two sainted monkeys having sex, a gay lion and a crocodile having sex, and then some guests at the wedding party; a pair involved in a seduction, a pair resorting to violence.  Sweeping through the center of the drawing is the marriage bouquet, starting in the arms of the bride, then ending in the lower left hand corner with a baby in a blanket.  I guess its pretty much my take on marriage.  The sex seems a bit scary and grim to me, the party guests behave badly, and the only hope is the infant progeny that is the biological fruit of all the messiness that goes on in a marriage.

If you wonder at all the chaos in the drawing, what with the patterned background and the little stories ranging round the center of the bridal bouquet (there are real lilies and roses drawn from flowers bought at the local grocery store, well, I added some boils to the lilies, mixed with imaginary plants and flowers and general shapes of hoopla inspired from real biological forms found in nature), and I have to conclude that all the messiness (tightly planned and controlled chaos) and frenzy and what promises to be sheer riot of color is a result of "horror vaccui", the hallmark of some schizophrenic art.  I believe that  horror vaccui is Latin for "fear of empty space".  I didn't choose horror vaccui to be present in my work, it just seemed a necessity.  I note that the lower my dose of antipsychotic medication the more prominent this phenomena is in my art.  It is pretty much absent on high doses of antipsychotics.  Currently I'm on a drug, but it is at half therapeutic dose.  When I say that I can't help myself and the insistence in my art toward insane pattern and overlap and detail, I mean it, I can't do art any other way.  Its my muse, it calls to me, the higher the energy level the more excited I become internally.  Horror vaccui isn't what I particularly want, but it seems to be what undeniably pleases me the most.

Here's an example of two artists which are used as classical models for the argument that unmedicated schizophrenics tend in their work toward horror vaccui.  Both works of art are museum quality art. I had some problems loading them into the blog.   The second drawing is by Adolf Wolfli who was locked up most of his life in a Swiss insane asylum and died there in 1930.  The first drawing is by a contemporary British artist Nick Blinko, who is only able to draw when he is medication free.

I am rather proud to be a schizophrenic who paints in oil rather than makes finished colored drawings.  My drawings are only a beginning means to an end - I don't consider them works of art inthemselves any more than an architect would prefer his sketches for a building over the built in stone and glass building.  Creativity is fun at times, but in my art there too is much simple labor and hard work that are a necessary and (frustrating, pain-in-my-ass) part of the process.   Oil paint is a long and labor intensive processes the way I do it.  But to my eyes the finished product looks like princess jewelry ripe for a wall of a collector to hang on.  What I hate about drawings is that there must be a piece of glass between the artwork and the viewer, and I think, the glass is a barrier, perhaps only psychological, perhaps not that big of a deal to most, but a barrier never-the-less that oil paintings avoid.

Famously Alfred Hitchcock would claim that all the creativity and fun was in the planning of the shots of his movies.  The actual filming and working with the actors he felt was dull and boring.  I don't hate the realization of the artwork as much as the planning process, but certainly, with the first you get a seat of your pants feel of flying and then a slow down, where  creative decision still must be made, but at a far less frequent rate.

I rather envy the commercially big artists who have a stable of artists to execute their ideas.  All the big artist need to is come up with ideas, and he has talented grunt labor to execute the ideas.  I read in an interview with Jeff Koons that if he were to personally paint one of his paintings it would take him six years for one canvass - but with over a hundred and forty artists in his employ, how much more is he able to produce every year!  Still, the paintings I saw in production for that article looked like glossy indulgent crap. At least my horror vaccui painting will be sincere.  Primitive, mad,  but heartfelt.

I'm hoping that I can finish this painting in four or five month's time.  I have no idea, I've never worked at this scale before.  Probably at some point the painting will hook me and I will start repeating a well worn and favorite prayer; "Dear God, please don't let me die until I've finished this painting."

Am I schizophrenic?

click on the image to enlarge


These four are bits and pieces of a much larger drawing.  I draw the paintings before I paint them.  Someone typed into the search engine "do schizophrenics plan their paintings?" and ended up being referred to my blog.  I liked the question.  Of the two living schizophrenic artists I know who have been represented by a New York city art gallery I only have definite information on one. The fellow who paints in oil plans his paintings.   The other who draws in pencil I do not know.


However, ten years ago when I helped design a large scale show of art by mentally ill artists at a clubhouse in Connecticut it was rather clear that most artists there did not generally plan their paintings.  One schizophrenic might have.  He had been an art professor at an art school before he got sick.   I read an interview in the New York Times with a schizophrenic artist who said that he thought abstract art was the best medium for a schizophrenic...................and to myself I thought yeah, it doesn't make you work too hard, just have fun and mess around with the paint.  But I'm all about the work ethic.  I've never ever painted abstract, and in my youth I had a lot of trouble appreciating abstract art.  But I have tried.  And in fact, just several weeks ago while researching a new, hot outsider artist who paints abstract, (he's new but he's dead) I saw one of his images and in a knee jerk reaction said to myself "that's beautiful".  So there's hope for me and my evolving sensibilities.

A little under a month ago I lowered my antipsychotic medication once more, with the cooperation of my medication nurse, and I'm now at a dose of 60mg Geodone while a therapeutic threshold for this drug is 120mg.  I have read schizophrenics having substantial relief of their symptoms at 60mg.  However, I exhibit as far as I can tell no symptoms of mental illness - other than having trouble concentrating for long periods of time.  My mood can be irritable, sad or angry, not nice things, but it all seems simply part and parcel of being a human being and in no way pathogenic.  If there was a problem with my mood there would be a problem in my marriage and my marriage is going along swimmingly.  There is no extreme in me. Probably the biggest oddity is my art and the subject matter of the images, but I look at a lot of modern art on the internet and from some sane artists who have been to art school and are showcased by outsider galleries there is nothing more shocking or odd about me than them.  I don't have a normal head, but neither do I seem to have a pathological head.

So I'm wondering if I haven't aged out of my schizophrenic disease.

Is it up for debate whether or not schizophrenia is chronic?

My medication nurse is against me going off Geodone completely.  She thinks because I was psychotic at 19 that I'm vulnerable to psychosis that that while off meds I might have several years of normalicy, but that psychosis will eventually return to me, as if I were a ticking time bomb.  Its genetic she says, you have a genetic predisposition to psychosis and that never goes away.  Also she believes that Geodone helps with depression.  I'm currently not at all depressed, but I am on MAO inhibitors and have a long history of depression that leads back into childhood.   Also I had episodes of mild mania around the times that I was psychotic.  Theoretically the Geodone could also prevent mania.  Mania is something I dread, as the treatment for it are mood stabilizers and those absolutely fuck creativity.

I'm also wondering if I was misdiagnosed.  I never heard voices.  I never hallucinated.  After a year and a half being in a hospital and labled major depression with psychotic features there was one short interview with an expert and bam, I got a new diagnosis that stuck as schizoaffective.  He said that simply while talking with me, while I was heavily medicated, he could tell the underlying illness was schizoprhenic in nature.

So maybe I talk like a weirdo.

My husband has said that I don't have a tact bone in my body.  He says I miss subtle social clues and blunder.  Since I don't know what he's talking about, and since I usually don't ever get embarrassed by anything I say, this blundering business is in his head, his reaction, and thankfully for my peace of mind, not in my own.  Imagine fearing before you talk that you will blunder.  That's something from my awkward teenage years, but I'm long over it.  My husband isn't embarrassed by me, rather he thinks I'm cute.  So for a long time now my ego has been telling me that he loves me for my wit and intelligence, but I have been newly informed that what he loves the most is my blunders.   I'm still rather pissed that several months ago while I was talking my mother covered my mouth with both her hands in order to shut me up.  All I had said to a third party was that in our kitchen our coat rack is very important to us because it  matches our dishes.  Which it does.  The dishes are green jadeware glass and the coat rack has green jadeware glass knobs at the end of its hooks.  Even my husband is puzzled why my mother covered my mouth.  He thinks the episode was funny.  But it was not singular in that I know that what comes out of my mouth sometimes makes my mother uncomfortable.  She would never, ever, cover the mouth of any of her other kids.  And hey, the pictures at the beginning of the post wouldn't be appreciated at all by my mother either.  So I think there is something fundamental about me that my mother rejects.

Since I've come down a great deal on my medication I realize that in conversation with people I only have two options.  One, I can say what I'm thinking.  Two, I can think something and stay silent.  But really I'm not built for any other mode of being.

The overall composition for this painting was initially planned late last August in a small, quarter size drawing.  I showed it to my husband and he said oh, that's so schizophrenic.  I told him that while I look at a lot of art by schizophrenics due to my relentless research about outsider art, he's seen relatively little of the real thing, by people who were institutionalized as insane for life back in the last century and before medication, so he really didn't know what he was talking about.

Still my husband sticks to his guns, and says that there is mental illness in my art.

I don't care. The bottom line is that I make art that is exciting to me.

And usually my life doesn't suck.  Its pretty fun.  Planning the biggest painting I've ever done is rather stressful to me, but as I've broken it down into bits and pieces, I always know what the next step is.

For at least the next week, maybe two weeks, I will be drawing the flowers of the bridal bouquet.  It is a very large and flowing bridal bouquet.  That ends with a baby in a basket. 

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.