Thinking About Writing

I long to write. But there is something about creating art, using these images of anonymous and forgotten ghosts, that is easier somehow. I give these characters my narratives, assign them my identity, so all of my paintings and collages are deeply personal. Still, writing is messier and unbearably painful. Rooting around in my mind is akin to performing exploratory surgery without anesthetic.

A Poem

In the centre of my pale moon-face,
aglow with sickness,
two craters -
two sunken eyes.
It takes a little longer to reach
your gaze,
at the end of a long, shadowy corridor.
It is a little frightening to look
so deep into mine.
Dragged in with the tide,
and down by the undertow.

Work In Progress

What To Live For

Yesterday someone asked me an interesting question: where, in your body, do you reside?
I used to live in my head but lately my answer is: "in my gut." I reside in my pain.
The follow-up question was: what would your gut say to you if it could speak? A ridiculous idea, for sure, but...
What would it say???

Literally Editing My Past

Here's some "found" writing from one of my many abandoned notebooks. Unfinished stories. Stories without beginnings, middles or ends; without heads, torsos or limbs. Cut and sewn into something with a semblance of sense.

Perched on a headstone, we take sobering swigs of coffee from a mason jar. I point out Orion's belt, the only constellation I can find. We have that in common.
Her legs are bony and downy, like a little boy's. Her black bob haircut has light brown roots.
I rub my hands over my freshly shorn head. It makes my molars tingle and my body turn into pins and needles. At home the bathroom is littered with hair. My head was getting so heavy and morbid that I had to get rid of some excess weight before I snapped.
I've drank too much coffee and my mind is humming, my nerves and bones are vibrating inside my sore, exhausted limbs. I'm a twenty-watt lamp with a sixty-watt bulb. I'm shooting sparks but nothing is catching.
Eventually day cracks on the horizon and slides its sickly yellow yoke across the sky. It's a queasy, greasy Sunday morning. My stomach won't settle until dusk.
Like a pair of zombies, we stumble out of the graveyard towards home.
We pass by the park where she first got me drunk on vodka and orange juice, and sent the world hurtling. It has been spinning wildly ever since. I look into her cole-smudged eyes, and the world spins and spins. I look up at the stars. They pin me down.

Looking Inward for Inspiration

As much as I would like to avoid the outside influence of media and other artists, I am not delusional enough to think that I am immune. But I like to think of popular culture in particular as a sort of tumor - not as crucial to my existence as a limb, but an extension of myself nonetheless. So, sequestered in my apartment and simmering in sickness, I am using my time to rifle through old notebooks for inspiration. It's a chaotic and disordered catalogue.

Experiments in Lomography

Snapshots from the Past

"Apparitions No.3" - mixed media, acrylic on canvas

I grew up in a nostalgic, sepia city where life was as dull as the prairie landscape, a flat-line across the country. Depressed by an endless and foreboding sky. It unsettled a paranoia in me. Storms came and threatened to lift off my house's roof like an ill-fitting hat. I had never experienced a tornado before, but was terrorized by the possibility. Convinced of its inevitability.

"Apparitions No.2" - mixed media, acrylic on wood

...the depths of the unknown and the infinity of space were both vying for the chance to consume me.

Childhood is grim and desolate and terrifying, and I remember being a miserable, serious child. I lived in constant fear of the universe and its endlessness. Darkness seeped into my orifices and filled me up with dread.

From "A Series of Self-Portraits"
"Apparitions No.1" - photo transfer and acrylic on wood

I have always had a fascination with the supernatural. This is a painting that I did probably well over a year ago, inspired by a vintage photograph from the twenties and reinterpreted as a sort of otherworldly self-portrait. I suppose that the effect that I have utilized is the kind usually achieved with a long-exposure photograph: a sort of still image of the process in which the head detaches itself from the body. However, the effect is also that the woman's head is a sort of tumor, obscenely regenerating itself again and again but oddly defying gravity.
Detachment is a familiar feeling for me. As a child and adolescent it paralyzed me with fear. I desperately wanted to ground myself, to feel solid, to connect back to "reality". The irony was in how much time I spent inhabiting my mind - so much so that I remember wishing that I could escape my constant stream of thought on many occasions. More recently I have fantasized of being able to hold my head at a distance, like a balloon on the end of a string tied tenuously around my wrist. So much farther from my the physical constraints of the body I loathe. So much lighter than the burden of flesh. Now detachment is my default. It is the coping mechanism I employ every day, although I dare say that I may not even inhabit my own head anymore. More likely I float just above it, ghost-like.