Art and Madness – Part II

“As for me, I am feeling well just now. I think M. Peyron is right when he says that I am not strictly speaking mad, for my mind is absolutely normal in the intervals, and even more so than before. But during the attacks it is terrible – and then I lose consciousness of everything. But that spurs me on to work and to seriousness, like a miner who is always in danger makes haste in what he does.”

- Vincent Van Gogh

Art has always been a very important part of my life. I can’t write that here without cringing slightly at how pretentious it sounds, but it’s the truth. I grew up with a cartoonist for a father, a watercolor artist as a grandfather, a quilter as a grandmother … the list goes on and on. While other families usually shun art and see it as something that will never get a person anywhere in life, my family constantly encouraged me to pursue it.

People always seem to want to know when I started drawing and how I learned to draw. Well, I started drawing the moment I could hold a crayon or pen or whatever and make a mark on paper with it, and I learned how to draw by drawing constantly. I never made a conscious decision to be an artist (and, in fact, I hate referring to myself as one); it’s simply part of who I am. I enjoy creating things.

For the most part, my drawings focus on people, especially faces. I started focusing on faces in my artwork when I was around twelve years old, I believe. I don’t know what the draw was, but it’s stuck with me.

Drawing was something I enjoyed that could help me relax and meditate no matter what was going on around me. That was the main reason I liked doing it, for the peace it brought me. But as I neared my twenties, my drawings started to scare me, and I didn’t always feel at ease when drawing anymore. My artwork started to become a threat.

(pen on a magazine clipping, 2004)

I am terrified by this dark thing
That sleeps in me;
All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.

- “Elm” Sylvia Plath

My fear of what might appear if I allowed myself to draw straight from my mind was enough to keep me focused only on drawing portraits and nothing else. I sensed that drawing from the images in my mind was dangerous and would unlock something terrifying in me. It was the same feeling I had during my breakdown when I feared that the thin layer between my world and the “other” world wasn’t going to hold much longer.

Near the end of 2006, though, I gave in a bit. The result was about two hundred drawings done over the course of a few weeks in a style that had seemingly come to me from out of thin air.

“Ifwhiteamerica…” from this series

(The Holy Bible is an album by the Manic Street Preachers)

It was somewhat of a relief to scribble furiously and feel like I was purging years of shit that had been locked up tight in some dark part of my mind, but there was still a part of me that felt apprehensive about it all. For years, I’d held a fear that one day I’d lose my mind and be fully aware that it was happening, but be unable to convey what was going on to anyone around me. I always told myself that there was no truth to that, that I was just being paranoid for no reason, but I couldn’t ever shake the feeling completely. As great as it had felt to get those drawings out of me, I retained the sense of dread over losing my mind, and I felt my artwork was somehow connected to that.

As time moved on, I realized that I could find out a lot about myself if I looked at my artwork. I’ve never been able to really understand my emotions unless they’re manifested in some physical way, and since that usually meant some form of self-harm, it was helpful to see that I could handle my emotions through art instead. But still that ominous feeling of mine lingered, and still those horrifying, grinning faces wouldn’t leave my mind or my artwork.

In the days leading up to my breakdown, some of my artwork gave tell-tale signs of what was to come. As I mentioned, I use artwork in order to help me better understand my emotions, so when I draw portraits, I pick faces that I think best represent my mood.

Left: days before the breakdown

Right: a few days into it

Soon after drawing the picture on the right, I started to lose the ability to draw. Well, draw how I used to, anyway. I still drew frequently, but I couldn’t focus enough to do work like before. As the excerpt at the beginning of Part I states, “the psychotic artist is at the mercy of his unconscious.” There was no choice to draw or paint anymore. It simply had to be done. There was also no planning ahead of art that was produced; there was only desperate scribbling.

“Concentrate. Concentrate. Where are you?”

During this period, I enjoyed drawing large shapes, especially circles. Sometimes my handwriting became like that of a child’s. I had no control over what I drew, I just drew. The whole page had to be filled. There was no sense to any of it. I drew until I felt it was “finished” and then I threw it aside and drew on the next page. In a way, it mimicked how I used to draw when I was younger. I remember overhearing a teacher telling my mom back then that my drawings were abstract and disconnected and all over the place, but they were very good, regardless. Most other kids drew houses or beach scenes; I drew t-shirts and hearts and other random things all over the page. Returning to that sense of artistic freedom again during this period was somewhat of a relief, but also a huge frustration due to my eyesight failing. I saw everything in double vision and through a fog. I felt like I was in a dream and could never focus on anything, least of all what I was drawing.

Part of me didn’t mind drawing this way,  but the rest of me worried that I would never be able to draw like I used to again. This concerned me more than losing what intelligence I had. Since my speech had been impaired at times during this period, I felt that my only way to truly speak to anyone was through my artwork. I didn’t want to be scribbling nonsense for the rest of my life. I wanted to make sense.

I kept pushing myself in my artwork because I wanted to re-learn to concentrate and draw like I used to. I also wanted my brain to stay as alert as possible. I felt that if I kept forcing myself to do things, whatever was wrong with me would give up the hold it had on my mind and let me return to who I used to be. My drawing tablet was a life-saver during this period, because it allowed me to draw without having to gather supplies (gathering supplies required making a list of what order to do things, which I usually couldn’t do because my memory didn’t exist and couldn’t hold information for long).

Eventually, my drawing abilities did start to return. Medication helped the fog to clear some and I was able to hold thoughts again and focus better. I was so happy when I completed a simple portrait using watercolor paint one day, because it proved that I still had something left; it hadn’t been taken from me. Looking at my drawings now, nobody would guess that 10 months ago I could barely draw at all.