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.

Choose What Hell Looks Like

So far this is my most complex painting.  I'm certain that I couldn't have done it without lowering my medication.  It is named "Tea Time".  It took three months to make.  If you click on the image you can see it better, larger.

There have been some difficulties in being on a lower dose of antipsychotic medication.  But knowing that I'm capable of doing pieces like this one, make me want to persevere.  Art is an incentive.  Enhanced creativity is an incentive.  I like to work.  Work gives me self esteem.

I'm so disabled, there's nothing else I can do but art.

 I recently read an article that flat out stated that medication for schizophrenics alters their creativity in such a way that the classic art by institutionalized schizophrenics is no longer capable of being made by contemporary schizophrenics.  What the institutionalized schizophrenics made was so unique, and so obsessive, and so detailed (all traits of Tea Time I believe) that little today made by medicated schizophrenics can compare.  I will tell you how medication, for me, impaired creativity

1.I was once satisfied with simpler compositions with far more empty or dead space.
2. dumming down of intellect (my husband says I'm much more perceptive and aware on less medication)
3. reduced powers of visualization (on less medication I can hold images much better in my imagination, work on them mentally over time ranging many months, and more images "pop" magically into being)
4.and most importantly, I can now work 4 to 5 hours a day while on high dose of meds I could only work a two hour window.  I've doubled my ability to concentrate on less meds.

I know of no medicated schizophrenic that can do an oil painting of the complexity and quality of Tea Time.  Oil painting is not drawing.  It takes more time, more patience, and you must have, if you are schizophrenic, an abundant time of patience, physical stability, and obsessiveness.

Obsessiveness is a quality that keeps you coming back to the one painting day after day, no matter how you feel emotionally, you work and work in fine detail, layer after layer of color until the canvass is saturated with pigment.  In order to do a painting such as Tea Time and be mentally ill, with an illness so disabling as schizophrenia, you have to sacrifice a lot.  Truely, your one aim in life has to be an artist.  Your one goal day after day is to paint.  Paint as much as is physically and psychologically possible until you are drained.  I don't ask that life be fun.  I don't ask that life be happy.  I don't ask that life be pain free.  And most certainly, I know, I don't try to fit in any shape or form into mainstream society.

The best times are content times.  Very little excitement, very little variation, a lot of isolation, - in fact I have wondered if I have not come full circle to the times when I was locked on a psychiatric ward for two years.   My world has narrowed down to my paintings.  What matters in life?  Only that the paintings get worked on day after day for as long as I'm capable.  Mostly I'm housebound.  I'm happy that usually I'm well enough to read books.  I think that from lack of physical exercise my blood circulation has altered.  Frequently my feet are uncomfortably cold.  This is a new physical phenomena.  The amount of time I spend in bed awake is about 6 to 8 hours a day. My side of the mattress has a huge dent in it.   Occasionally the only time I am capable of leaving the bed is to pee and eat.  Sometimes I must gather all my resolve simply to dress or undress.

Mad?  Yes.  But the only other alternative is medicated.  And on more antipsychotic medication I am also made depressed and suicidal.  A SIDE EFFECT OF A THERAPUTIC DOSE OF ANTIPSYCHOTIC MEDICATION IS SUICIDAL THOUGHTS AND DEPRESSION IN MY CASE.  My husband backs me up on this.  It is not only my observation, it is his too.

Yes, on half theraputic dose I sometimes feel crazy.  I tell my husband I feel crazy a lot.  Not sad, not depressed, just that everything can barely be endured.  My husband tells me I'm not acting crazy, and I'm not talking crazy, so he doesn't know what I mean.  I guess I mean that I know that I'm greatly reduced to saying little, doing little, being little and while I know that life for most is big, for me it is small and narrow.   But I know the alternative is simply more medication and poorer quality artwork.  My medication nurse kept on promising that on more and more Geodone I would feel less and less depressed.  She said the medication had a natural antidepressant quality.  THAT IS NOT MY BIOLOGY.  FOR ME, THAT IS A BOLD FACED LIE.  GIVING ME MORE AND MORE MEDICATION MADE MY LIFE HELLISH. crying all the time.  saying I wished I was dead all the time.  Now I feel crazy but I don't cry and I don't feel worthless and sad and I rarely cry or wish I was dead.

So now I'm whittled down to the natural hell of schizophrenia.  The choice is only one hell or the other.  But in the hell I chose, I get to make lovely paintings like "Tea Time".

My husband recently told me that during his time as a mental health professional he watched a motivational video about a man who was schizophrenic and owned his own business.  The man stressed that the success of this life was only possible because of medication.  My husband said that uncomfortably, the man being glorified by the video about rehabilitation, looked half dead.  I asked my husband, was he overweight?  Yes, very, my husband said.  But that wasn't what was so disturbing to him.  It was just that he seemed to lack emotion, vitality, personality, - spirit.  I said that probably he fit neatly into the statistic that schizophrenics die 25 years earlier then the rest of the population.  After all, on medication, seventy pounds ago, I was once told by a doctor that I would die early of a weight related disease.

I'm alive in spirit, I'm in psychic pain often, and I'm doing great artwork.

And its really cool that I can fit into a size small dress.

Schizophrenia Necklace

Last week I wore my schizophrenia necklace in public.

I made the necklace over ten years ago. Haven't worn it in about five years.   It is a gold chain with 14k alphabet charms attached.  There are 13 letters in the word "schizoprhenia" so it was pretty pricey to order the gold charms from the jewelry store.  However, I felt I needed a pride statement.

Gay people have the rainbow.

Cancer survivors have the pink ribbon.

What could I have to express who I was and that I was proud to be me to the world? Or at least persevering under the conditions that I face.

Not knowing if there is any symbol for schizophrenia, I made a word made out of gold.  Pure gold shows pride, doesn't it?

What can you wear to show that you are a survivor of schizophrenia?  (or must it be kept a deep dark secret?)  Is there any sense of pride to be associated with this loathsome disease?

You can say to yourself I'm not a disease, I'm so much more than a disease, and yet, this disease inevitably finds some way of defining you.  It is just knowing that being gay is part of your identity or having survived cancer is part of your identity.  These things aren't something that you choose, it is rather thrust upon you by fate.  And so you go out into society having a unique experience on life that gives you a unique view on life.  When it is a gorgeous warm sunny day outside and I can't get out of bed except to pee, being near catatonic and having something very wrong with my thinking process, isn't the disease leading my life by the nose?  Oh, I think to my self, how lovely it would be to take a walk, but I can't because I'm so disabled and helpless (and diminished and small and fragile)  that I can't get out of bed.  

I know that the past three years spent with my former therapist we were working on unlinking me from the medical model that says I'm sick and diseased.  But if you suffer, as I have been lately, the mental illness identity is thrust upon you.  Your mind can twist and squirm and rationalize things like "my mind is diseased but my soul is healthy" or "I am not my mind, I'm more than mind, I'm soul too" or "I'm not going to define myself as anything other than a human being".  Helpful thoughts, but what you are going through inevitably makes you feel at odds with the rest of the world.  You know you belong to a large club, THE CLUB THAT SUFFERS,like rape victims or refuges displaced by a civil war, but you belong to a smaller subset, the club that suffers a pure form of torment of the mind.  Caused by no one and nothing that you can put your finger on and blame.

For a while people with mental illness adopted the purple irises like the ones that Van Gogh painted.  I don't know if that symbol ever caught on and is still current.  Personally, I think Van Gogh was bipolar rather than schizophrenic because his production rate was nothing like I've ever seen from a schizophrenic artist.  I think mania fueled him.  And there is a disorganization and skew of reality in the best schizoprhenic art that wasn't present in Van Gogh's art.  He worshiped nature, he drew nature, he was very very sophisticated in his mature phase of painting in that nature, and its close analysis, was the subject of his art.  Critical thinker, organized thinker, and mind put into the eye.  Unmedicated schizophrenics in my experience can't produce at the rate and quality of Van Gogh, even if they had artistic training before the onset of their disease.  And they aren't inspired by nature, rather, they express usually inner torment artistically. They are compelled to look inward rather than outward.  But there are very very few examples to choose from in history who were both schizophrenic and artistically prolific and above all unaffected by medication.

So I think the purple irises symbolize the suffer as mentally ill, but not specifically schizophrenic.  I want to be specific.

Today Van Gogh would be medicated for a mood disorder and or psychosis and his creativity would plummet.  He would never produce the quality that of work which has made him famous.  I do think if you kill psychosis you kill off the root of creativity, or at least the finer part of it.  I've read that other's who study art agree.  The golden age of art made by schizophrenics in insane asylums is over.  However, usually the modern mentally ill person because of their illness believes that they are more creative than the norm.  On or off medication.   I don't know if this is an ego boosting stereotype that schizophrenics buy into.  In my view, there is psychosis, and then there is poverty of thought.  Both are active in the schizophrenic.  No schizophrenic I know would ever describe themselves with such a loathsome phrase as poverty of thought, but this is honestly what I live with sometimes.  My thoughts are so weak that I don't have the energy to speak.  Or move. Or listen to other people talk.

For about a year coming down on medication I felt very very good with almost no symptoms of mental illness other than the persistent inability to concentrate for longer than four to five hours on my artwork.  My therapist would ask me "well, are you or aren't you schizophreic?" and i would say, "wait, we'll see."  Once he said, you aren't schizophrenic, your just high maintenance.  I suppose he was saying I was the type of demanding hysterical woman that some men do their best to avoid.    Still, my mood the last year was good and I genuinely enjoyed life.  I've had difficulty with concentration since I was nineteen and suffered the onset of mental illness, and sometimes I wonder whether or not what happened at nineteen that changed me forever was a simple old fashioned nervous breakdown with bells and whistles of psychosis and mania.

And then I quit therapy for several reasons. 1) we could barely afford it 2) the therapist repeated the same advice and I got sick and tired of listening.  He wanted me to detach from my emotions.  He considered himself spiritually informed by Eastern religion, and he had this obsession that health was possible if you lived from the authentic self (code name for soul).  But I was not to use words like soul or religion because frankly he grew up Catholic and had been traumatized by the religion and while he could not deny a fascination with all things religious, it was traumatic to him personally to use religious words or references.  All he read were books by religious monks, nuns, priests and philosophy thinkers but he only felt safe referring to them as "spiritual".  I called them religious books and he corrected me.  I personally like to think that I have a soul, but even this smacked too much to him of religion, so he used the term "authentic self" whenever we were discussing things which were soul-like.  He said you were only safe and sound identifying yourself as a human being - all else lead to some other vague sort of emotional ruin.  Wife, artist, daughter, schizophrenic - these labels were all bad and led to distress inevitably, or so he promised. Problem at its root was that he was seeking and believed he had found a formula for sanity and he was rather trying in the name of healing to brainwash me with it.  Didn't work.  Had to rather flee from his therapy.

I tried explaining that I was terribly attached and obsessed with my art while I was making it and this attachment was necessary for the process - since it is long and grueling for me to paint a painting.  Right now I'm looking at making two paintings a year.  You have to be really really invested in the project to stay focused and interested in one canvass for six months, day after day.  I attach and I flourish at what I do where other schizophrenics flounder and fail.  Also, I'm attached to my husband and my dog.  Oh, I will suffer horribly to lose one or the other.  However, my therapist made a specific point that he was not attached to his dog (which always lay on the floor through all therapy sessions) and said that he was in the process of detaching from his only daughter.  This was for her sake and for his sake  He encouraged me to detach from my husband, promising me that I could love him BETTER once I had detached.  This smacks of Eastern religious gobblygook. Nuts to that.

At one point he said that it would be best to sever contact from both my parents.  They were toxic.  And they do have a distressing effect on me quite often.  But he wanted me to stop seeing them, stop talking to them.  Detach.  Even if this meant loosing my inheritance.  He taunted me that I was selling my soul for a house.  (now we pay rent to my mother, but our home is promised to be willed to us).

I still think the parental  bastards deserve endless chances.  Stay away as much as possible when they totally rupture peace of mind, but return, always slink away and heal, then return.  They are your parents afterall.  You loved them unconditionally as a child.  I believe that child inside hurts itself if it totally gives up on its parents.  Lately I have realized that I am more moral than either one of my parents.  Hoorah!  Let them think I'm sick, at least I have ethics.  It is rather a comfort to believe in your little ethical self.  Especially when the self is rather tormented by mental illness.

So I stopped seeing my therapist in mid February, and by now, mid May, I see that I'm having episodes of emotional torment that weren't present in February.   There is decline in quality of life.  Did I need therapy?  Seeing someone once a week?  Perhaps.  I just emailed our local art school and asked for a partial scholarship to attend a summer adult open studio seminar that meets twice a week for a little over a month.  I figured after ending therapy I became too much of a recluse and need to get out of the house more often.  Only making art as the whole point of your life for me is a downward spiral.  I need contact with other humans besides my husband.  He's great, but I do remember once during my first hospitalization a ward nurse calling me a "social butterfly".  Always, what I have enjoyed the most about being on a mental ward (and there isn't much to enjoy) was interaction with the other patients.  The lunatics you observe and keep your distance from because they might physically attack you.  Kid you I not, I've been attacked.  Brutally.  And they same guy that attacked me tried to strangle someone else.  The majority of the patents in a hospital however, having been freshly traumatized by their mental illness, are refreshingly human and immediate and uncomplicated.  And nice to talk to.  But the lunatics, simply observe.  You must practice self preservation in a psychiatric ward. 

I don't think at all for about two years now that I have been gradually lowering my medication have I ever thought to myself "Is my quality of life so poor that maybe I should think about ending it all?"  When such a thought occurres, as they have recently I think ah ha!  A sign that I am mentally ill and suffering.  And maybe, just maybe, the ship is sinking on this low dose of medication and you are headed toward a suicidal crisis.  Not yet.  But there are now clouds on the horizon.

But I'm generally not depressed.  Tormented, yes.  Occasionally tormented definitely.  Why am I tormented?  I don't know.  But I did wear my schizophrenia necklace last week.  So I know something is wrong with me. 

Once I stopped therapy the ship started to sink.  But I'll be damned before I go back to that man.  I don't care if detachment has led to happiness for my therapist and maybe some of his patients.  I don't want to detach from life.  Sleep on the sofa when my husband pisses me off, yes, not call a parent because I'm not in the mood to deal with their ways, yes, but I can't be a cloud floating through the sky, as he told me to be, over and over again.

The cloud observes the sky.  But it is separate from the sky.  Be the cloud in the sky.  Sounds simple, but it really doesn't help me.  It helps a little, but i get the concept and I don't want to hear that form of advice again. 

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.