Post # 40

2013

S spat violent desolation at me when I tried to comfort him, embrace him, love him. I suggested rehab––he hated the idea. The addiction he wrestles minutely had me by the throat. The psyche ward is a profane place of human effibility. The unspeakable human suffering is further repressed with chemical restraints. There is no talking cure. The mental hospice is utterly broken down––not a place of healing at all. It is underfunded. Undernourished. At home I started drawing Louise Bourgeois inspired blood babies with red ink, maybe in a bid for somekind of catharsis––a need for liberation from this dark torrent of pain in me. I bleed the ink with water. Something starts to grow out of the borders of the child––another organism––pretty constellations. I’ve enjoyed Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin’s collaberative drawings in gouache and ink (2009-2010). The exploration of wounds through which one rebirths the self as something else. I don’t know where that kind compassionate man has gone––he is thwarted. He’s fed the transplanted self instead––the addict. But he is still there somewhere.

Boundary Speak (Diaries 2013-2021) centrally focuses on reportage of my life’s happenings, notes on readings, phantasms or wild forays, riffs off music or footnotes from poems that take me on a strange journey and thought fragments. My outsider artwork is focal on my Re-learn your Alphabet for the Twenty-First Century drawings (some of which are collaborations with my children), my robot series, as well as many other drawings undertaken over the period 2013-2021.