What are you looking at?

Artistic Spirit and Spirits? I chose this title because my inspiration comes from spirits. Spirits - meaning alcohol. My father is a severe alcoholic and has been all my life. I have become so obsessed with this aspect of my life that some would consider it unhealthy.

Some families’ skeletons are in the closet. My family’s skeletons were buried in the front yard, right out in the open for anyone to discover, but no one so much as hinted to us that they knew. To create my artwork, I go out to my front yard with a shovel and I start digging up the bones. I examine these things, these secret events that occurred in my past and continue to occur today. I start reliving them as I dig deeper into the ground. The hole that I am digging is not a place of dreams or fantasy; it is quite real to me. As I apply these “bones” to canvas or paper, the pain that used to occur gets a little easier to deal with, although it will never disappear completely. Art is powerful emotion recollected in agitation. I can’t completely let go of these secrets, so they eat at me and eat at me until I come to a breaking point. I feel like I was baptized in a river of whiskey, and the stench, to this day, is still oozing out of my pores. The images of my father’s addiction are carved into the back of my skull, and it has poisoned my thoughts to a point where it is impossible to go a day without thinking of it. I am haunted by the reality of it all. It is at these points, these “breaking points,” where the idea for a new work reveals itself.