Concerning my artwork and a charity project

A few months ago, I was approached online and asked to donate some Michael Jackson related artwork for an art project / tribute book, the money from sales ALL being donated to sick children. I liked the idea, so I gave permission for the above painting to be used in the book.

Here is a short video (not made by me) that describes the project & gives some details of what the book looks like (my artwork is included).

More background information on the project can be viewed at this site.

The book can be ordered here.

If you’re not interested in buying a copy yourself, please pass the word around to others you know who might!

I’m proud to have been involved in this project, and I really hope it does well

It’s a very, very mad world

While perusing deviantart the other week, I happened upon this piece by a Hungarian artist working under the username KA-113. I found the photograph so haunting and well done that I decided to check out the rest of her work.

When I came upon this piece, I immediately loved it. I kept the window open while I worked on something else, and kept returning to it, wanting to comment, but being unsure of what to say, exactly.

Then it finally hit me. I was drawn to it so much because the creature looked so much like the most dominant group of creatures I’d feared during my psychotic break (and at times outside of the break, but their presence was the most severe during that period).

I commented to the artist, not sure if she’d understand what I had to say, but needing to say it, anyway. I summarized my disorder and explained how I’d finally realized why I liked the piece so much and what it meant to me.

I received a reply comment the next day informing me that the artist herself was diagnosed with schizophrenia last year as well, and “these demons” had “hunted [her] year by year.”

I was taken by complete surprise at her comment because I hadn’t expected her to understand much of what I meant (regarding my disorder, not my English), let alone apparently share the same hallucinations as me! It was utterly bizarre, but also quite “nice” in a way. When it comes to hearing voices, having various delusions, and hallucinating, it’s very difficult to communicate what it’s like to anyone who doesn’t deal with the same thing, and even when one is able to find another who understands, everything rarely matches up exactly the same. There are similar stories of what people experience (delusions of being persecuted by the government / other people in general / the devil probably being amongst the top “popular” categories), but it’s rare to find someone who shares your experience completely. This woman is the only person I’ve come across so far who has apparently seen the same things I’ve seen, and it’s a “relief” in an odd way. I’d obviously prefer that nobody deal with anything like this, but it’s nice to stumble across someone who can understad more than others about what my world is made up of at times. I think the biggest frustration in this all is that it’s near impossible for other people to truly understand anything about my experiences, and it’s unsettling for me to realize that this whole other world only exists to me, so it’s nice to find someone else who can understand better than most about where I’m coming from.

Disturbia

I couldn’t stay asleep last night. I woke up every few hours or so.

Around five in the morning, I kept feeling the presence of my dog around. My dog died in October. Then, seemingly out of nowhere, I felt that I had to perform a certain task in order to bring my dog back to life. It happened the same way it happens when I suddenly feel that I should start cutting up my arm or burning my wrist. I wandered out to the kitchen and got the large container of salt. Then I found a paper plate and green highlighter. I wrote “MANDY” on the plate with the marker and placed it on the carpet in the living room. Then I poured a circle of salt around it. After that, I went back to bed and fell asleep.

When I woke up this morning and came out of my room, my mom and brother were standing over the salt / plate and asked me what it was. I said I thought it would bring Mandy back. My mom hugged me and said, “I wish it were that simple.” She hugged me again a bit later on and started crying a bit.

I don’t know what’s going on anymore. To myself, I don’t feel that I’m that crazy, but I realize that I’m being instructed to do things that are a bit strange to others. It’s different than it’s been before. I feel guided to do things, not threatened. Sometimes I wonder if I really am talking to the dead. I don’t know what to think. I can tell this is all hurting others though, which is what most upsets me.

In other news of what’s been going on lately, I start the partial hospitalization program on Monday. I went in for an assessment yesterday, and quite a few of the questions asked upset me because I had to talk about things from my past that I usually like to not think about. It really set me off for a while, but I had therapy later on and that helped calm me down.

My therapist told me that I have a very blunted affect, and she asked me a series of questions about my emotions. I told her that I haven’t truly felt much of anything since I was about twelve. I can recognize social cues (like an angry face, crying due to being sad) and react to them, so she said that proves I have the ability to be empathetic, but as for how I show emotions myself, it’s extremely limited.

I’m going through another period of intense paranoia lately. I’ve deleted a lot of things of mine from the internet. It’s difficult for me to even write here sometimes. I feel like all of this is going to be used against me. I’ve had people make fun of me recently online and that’s only helped fuel all of this and make me think that how I see everything is true. The only way I’m able to keep writing here currently is to remind myself that it’s helping others somehow. Lately, I don’t really understand what’s going on, and it’s difficult for me to even think of myself as dealing with an illness, because it all feels so normal and “right,” but somewhere I know the truth.

I drew this sometime last week, and I think it’s an accurate self-portrait of how I feel currently. Nothing much feels “real” anymore, and it’s almost as if I’m disappearing except for a small portion of my true self that’s left.

I believe I can see the future / cos I repeat the same routine

I liked being on zyprexa (anti-psychotic) at first, but after having my dosage increased in the hospital, I’ve been having loads of crappy side effects. I’m calling my psychiatrist on Monday to sort out this issue. It’s so frustrating to go through this cycle of trial and error. I thought I’d stopped it once I was on geodon, but after a few months on it, it started to give me really awful side effects. That’s when I just stopped taking it cold turkey, without the doctor’s approval, and everything went to shit.

I’m not sure how far to plan ahead in my life right now. I want to attend classes next semester, but I want to feel like I’m fairly stable and with a combination of medication that will allow me to function properly. The worst side effects that I get are suicidal thoughts / depression and akathisia. Akathisia makes you want to bang your face into a wall repeatedly and kill people. It’s a very intense feeling of uneasiness, and when it happens to me, I pretty much want to kill myself. The last time it happened was during my hospitalization; I was lying in bed and I couldn’t get comfortable no matter what position I laid in. I kept pulling at the skin on my face and arms in order to calm myself down. It was fucking awful.

Anyway, the only side effects I’m experiencing now are slight weight gain and pretty severe fatigue in the mornings. I just slept for quite a while, even though I slept through the night. Ugh.

I feel okay right now though. I got through yesterday without incident and today seems to be going in the same direction (aside from the sleeping). I’m seeing my therapist in a few hours for an emergency session because of my recent hospitalization. I like my therapist, so I’m looking to it. Talking through things really helps me.

For what it’s worth, I’ve done these two drawings last night / today:

Art and Madness – Part III

“It’s very romantic to think ‘I’m a tortured writer,’ but mental institutions are not full of people in bands. They’re full of people with so-called normal jobs.”

- Richey Edwards

I had a dream years ago wherein a nurse was calling me with results of some kind of test that had to do with my mental health and my sleep pattern. He told me that the results had come back the worst they’d ever seen and everyone was freaking out over them. Worriedly, I asked him what they were going to do in order to help me. In response, he just laughed and said, “Oh, we’re not going to do anything because you’re one of those creative people, an artist or whatever, and we know you need all this dysfunction in order to get work done,” and then he hung up on me.

It’s a common misconception that artists and mental illness go hand in hand. To me, that’s like saying that there’s a connection between teachers and cancer or businessmen and diabetes. Mental illness is not a gift; it’s, well, an illness. Having a mental illness does not suddenly make one a genius or great artist; those things are what one is despite an illness.

Of course, I won’t deny that art can be influenced by mental problems. There are numerous examples of this, and you’ve seen some of my own. That’s as far as the connection goes though. Speaking from my own perspective, art was a way for me to cope with my issues, it wasn’t a byproduct of them.

In order to better illustrate this point, I’ll use the story of Richey Edwards.

Richey was the lyricist of the band the Manic Street Preachers. He suffered from bouts of depression, self-harm, and anorexia nervosa. He disappeared in early 1995 and hasn’t been seen or heard from since. The band had just released their album The Holy Bible the year before, which is now widely hailed as the Manics’ best work, and also, some say, Richey’s suicide note. It confronts such issues as the Holocaust, anorexia nervosa, prostitution, capital punishment, and nihilism. Richey’s mental health near the release of the album was very poor, and some accused him of flaunting his problems to gain publicity for the band (he famously carved “4REAL” into his arm during a 1991 interview with Steve Lamacq). In a 1994 interview, James Dean Bradfield, the Manics’ lead singer, said, “I think it would make me angry if Richey’s songwriting just became therapy. I always thought that we wrote about other people apart from ourselves in a much better manner.” Richey added, “I wouldn’t allow that to happen, I would leave if that was the case.”

Richey did write lyrics that dealt with his own issues, but he wrote them from the point of view of people other than himself. He maintained incredible insight into his illnesses. His lyrics were extremely raw and honest. Indeed, one lyric states, “I’ve been too honest with myself; I should have lied like everybody else.”

The question to ask, then, is would Richey Edwards have been able to write how he did if it weren’t for his mental illnesses?

The answer is yes. Early works by the Manic Street Preachers prove this.

Richey had a great penchant for history, literature, and politics. The Manics’ early albums, especially Generation Terrorists, touch on these issues. Even The Holy Bible contains references, albeit spaced between lyrics dealing with Richey’s problems. Had Richey not been mentally ill, the band still would have stood apart loud and brilliantly from other bands. The young Manics were loud and angry about everything. Richey’s 4REAL incident certainly helped get the band attention, but they were already gaining attention through other means, and I believe that if that occurance hadn’t happened, they’d still have made a name for themselves somehow.

Richey’s problems only hindered the band overall. Over the years, everything started to become less about the band and more about Richey’s mental health. Everything was really starting to fall apart during the last tour they did as well. Richey’s problems cast a shadow over everything and put everyone on edge. If asked, nobody would have credited Richey’s issues for contributing positively to the band in any form. It was gaining them publicity, but it was the wrong publicity.

In conclusion, art and mental illness may co-exist frequently, but from my own experience, they are not necessarily connected in the way that most people assume they are. I would still be an artist if I weren’t mentally ill; I would still be mentally ill if I weren’t an artist. Schizoaffective disorder provides me with no benefits in any form to my life. Mental illness is not glamorous and does not assist my artwork or intelligence in any way.

In closing, this excerpt (shown to me by my friend, Carolyn) sums up everything I believe quite nicely:

“… whether or not psychological pain bestows or perhaps enhances creativity is an old debate. It is the question of, for example, “Would a happy Charles Dickens have written A Tale of Two Cities?” In working for many years with a great many traumatized people, artists, musicians, and writers among them, I have answered this question to my own satisfaction, and my answer is this: I do not think a happy Charles Dickens would have done less brilliant work, particularly if he were happy because he had recovered from being unhappy. On the contrary, I think that the natural genius of Charles Dickens would have expressed itself even more luminously – and also that the people around him would have led far more comfortable lives.

Happiness is not a mixed blessing.

I tell this to those of my patients who fear they will lose a certain creative edge should they be “cured”. One does not lose one’s edge. If anything, it becomes a finer blade, and – the best part – one does not have to bleed for it nearly so much. A talented person is not talented because of his or her pain. She or he is talented despite it. The pain is like a gauzy grey mist that has wrapped itself several times around a priceless clear light.”

- The Myth of Sanity: Divided Consciousness and the Promise of Awareness

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.

Art and Madness – Part I

“Freud once said that the artist creates a world of fantasies because his inner needs are ‘too clamorous’ to be gratified in real life. The inner needs of the mentally ill are very clamorous indeed, and psychotics do indeed often turn to art. Inmates of mental institutions sometimes cover walls, floors, and every scrap of paper with their drawings. Since Freud’s time, physicians have learned to value this production, not only as a source of clues to their patient’s problems, but also as a vivid, often harrowing picture of the psychotic mind itself. Most artists have the control to choose what they paint. The psychotic artist is at the mercy of his unconscious. He has no choice; he must illustrate the maelstrom which has him in its grip.” – The Mind, Life Science Library

Louis Wain was an English artist who became well known for his drawings of cats (above). Late in his life, he suffered from schizophrenia, and his drawings took a somewhat horrifying twist.

Nobody is entirely sure whether his drawings took a turn due to his schizophrenia or not. As someone who has created psychotic art, my belief is that these drawings are indeed due to Wain’s schizophrenia.

In addition, William Kurelek suffered from early onset schizophrenia during his 20s and created this painting (The Maze) while in a hospital in order to communicate to his doctors. The painting depicts the artist lying in a field with his skull split open to reveal various compartments that describe parts of his life. This webpage goes into detail of some of the panels. Kurelek eventually recovered from his schizophrenic symptoms and his later paintings reveal none of the horrors depicted in his earlier works like this one.

Lastly, but digressing slightly from schizophrenic art (that is, art drawn by true schizophrenics), an excerpt from Madness and Modernism by Louis A. Sass offers a comment about the artwork of Francis Bacon:

“Deanimation, fragmentation, and other bizarre or uncanny alterations of the body-ego are often apparent in schizophrenic responses to the Rorschach inkblot test.

Something akin to this experience seems to be captured in certain portraits by Francis Bacon, portraits that have been interpreted as depicting “the disintegration of the social being which takes place when one is alone in a room which has no looking-glass… [when] the accepted hierarchy of our features is collapsing and… we are by turns all teeth, all eyes, all ears, all nose… suddenly adrift, fragmented, and subject to strange mutation.”

Francis Bacon, Self-portrait, 1971

Being a fan of Bacon’s work, I wasn’t too surprised to see him mentioned in a book about art and insanity, but I was surprised that someone other than myself had felt the connection between his paintings and schizophrenia (Bacon himself wasn’t schizophrenic). My first introduction to Bacon was through finding his painting Figure with Meat in an art book years ago. I felt that it was representational of the type of world that I was catching glimpses of (the faces that I mentioned in this post); he had captured what I’d been trying to produce for years in my own artwork.

I believe Francis Bacon’s work is about as close to portraying schizophrenia through images as the world will ever see. The utter chaos and silent terror that most of his paintings exhibit is so near to what I experienced that it’s, well, scary. During a small part of my psychotic period, I even believed that I was living in a Bacon painting (Man with Dog, for the curious).

The fragmentation of self was something that I experienced as well. I felt as if my body were made up of parts that weren’t connected in any way. Sometimes I felt I was only a pair of teeth or fingers. I didn’t see myself as a whole person at all. My view of myself occasionally mimicked that of Kurelek’s self lying in the field of his painting; I was something made up of muscle and bone and I could see it all clearly. I stopped having skin and just became a mess of all my organs, veins, and appendages. As terrifying as that all probably seems, my reaction wasn’t that of terror in any way; I was more annoyed above everything else. I can’t recall when I stopped feeling this way, but it eventually faded and I haven’t experienced it since.

In conclusion, having now discussed other artist’s representations of madness (whether intentional or not), Part II will delve into my own experience with psychotic art.