Ghost Story: Part Three

Utterly deflated - I need new life. So I put a record on.
I shimmy my bones to the record playing. Close my eyes and feel it fill out my hips, my ass, my soul. Dance real slow. A cold beer in one, numb hand. A clove cigarette in the other. Slink around the apartment. Pause in the bathroom to tap the ashes into the sink and glare at myself in the mirror.

Swamp Thing

Born from the swamp, out of the sludge and mire.

She is radiant - glowing with something beautiful but menacing.

Who is in the details...???

Amorphous Matter

Friends?...Sisters?...Lovers?...Or...

Monster???
Everyone gawked and taunted. What was it? The ambiguous creature was frightening to behold: it resembled two girls, but no one could tell where one ended and the other one began. They were inseparable; a grotesque, amorphous figure; womanly but offensive. Something needed to be done...

Ghost Story: Part Two

Darkness pours from the sky. It swirls and eddies around me, cold and cajoling. It is thrilling and frightening, the way my body responds to the cruel night air. How easily my flesh excites. How my own darkness reflexively leaps to the surface. The little life remaining in me barely keeps me inflated. I exhale and watch it come out in a puff of smoke. Then disappear.

 

Lost

Ghost Story: Part One

An apparition in black silk and lace. The shift dress hovers around her form like a spell.
The gust of wind that brought her was exhilarating and terrifying. You can tell a spirit by the way the wind moves her. It enters her orifices and bends and shakes her limbs like a sapling.

The slurp and hiss of a bottle of soda being opened - that's what it sounds like when my head pops off. It's one of my favorite sounds. Last evening I uncorked myself and let my soul out to roam. It wandered the whole night looking for a new vessel.
I awoke in a fetal position covered with bruises. It has been a brutal rebirth. Upright, my vision turns to static. Slowly I regain reception and stumble into a scalding shower to thaw. I wash my new body with soapy hands and marvel at how dangerous the soft, downy skin feels stretched taut around such sharp bones.
This body has a weak grip on me, so close to death as it is...

"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.