Here is the second set of pages from my Art Journal. This page is dedicated to my former student who attempted suicide by slashing his wrist. He was found moments later by his mother who unexpected returned home because she forgot something in her bedroom. This was his response when I asked him "Why did you try to kill yourself?"
The picture on the left is the beginning picture. The picture on the left is the finished spread. I took black Gesso and tinted it with watercolor concentrate (blue and purple) which gave the gesso a more purple cast rather than a flat black. On the left page, I lightened up the Gesso by using watercolor crayons and misted them with water and spread the color with a paper towel.
The right page was recolored with more of the Gesso mixture but was left to dry. It was treated with a misted paper towel to move the color around a little bit. The writing was done in a circular pattern to mimic the downward spiral mentioned in the quote and was done with a silver gel pen. In the middle of the writing is a red Sharpie mark.
The text reads:
You look around you and everything is dark--up, down, left, right. And you feel like you are falling but in no particular direction. You feel motion--you feel the air rushing against your cheeks but you can only see the darkness. If you see a light you don't know if it's the way up or the way down. As you draw the razor against your arm you feel relief. You see something other than dark and you get lost in the color. You concentrate on the color and you forget your problems. That's what it's like to kill yourself.
5 comments:
Wow...
Wow--The painting or the text? When I was a college professor, I was also a grief counselor. I have a lot of these scenarios stuck in my head or written down in my personal journals over the years.
wow, the text. I'm not terribly creative w/ words, so 'wow' was the best I could come up with to describe my reaction. It's always been hard for me to understand how someone could be so unhappy that they would kill themselves, leaving behind family and friends to grief (and perhaps blames themselves!). The page w/ the square of light is very evocative.
I am enjoying your beautiful and revealing art journey.
Depression is no laughing joke. Society ,medical community got to realize it's like a physical problem .It needs to be treated as such,We as a society need to talk about depression in the open. it's not a plague.
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