just look at the pictures...: Lost in the night and the fog you have no place.

Lost in the Night and the Fog You Have No Place. I found that sentence written under a drawing in one of my sketchbooks from this past year and it seemed to fully sum up the state I had reached after 6 straight years of the toil, isolation, and self-critique of art school.

The images and words of this show are enlarged snippets lifted out of my sketchbooks. Stylistically they are a return to the type of little paintings I did before I had any training, but subject matter-wise they are a continuation of the examination of self that I have been doing this past year in Ireland. Some of it is very sad and some of it is very strange.

Lost in the Night and the Fog You Have No Place turned out to be a sort of clearing out of residue left in my head from this past year and from the difficult turn my brain has taken in these past 6 years. The constant self-examination and critique has taken a huge toll on my psyche. And the level of seriousness with which I have approached my education added to that hugely. I feel that I failed at everything I attempted until I turned to art. And once I recognized that art was the only thing for me I threw my every energy into it with a seriousness that I had never produced before in my life. Which has served me well scholastically but has also backfired into a loss of happiness in my life and even joy in my art-making process.

This past year as an MFA was the most difficult of my life so far. I have delved as deeply and openly into hidden parts of my life as I feel possible. It was important for me to do this but I had put no thought into the after-effects of such exploration.

I returned to Seattle this summer in a state of complete emotional numbness. And soon after my homecoming I experienced further personal upset in a break-up that added hugely to my downward spiral of pain. This was the catalyst of my downfall, I think because I had clung to that relationship as the last thing that brought me happiness. Without it I felt completely detached from the world. For three months I sunk further and further. Initially I blamed this all on the break-up but the further I fell the more I saw that every single thing in my life had been slowly shifted and I no longer had any sense of belonging to anything or anywhere.

The ultimate push into massive depression for me was working on the project I had originally planned as the work for this show. The sadness of it was overwhelming. I would work and work at it while crying the entire time. I think focusing on the pain of others at this moment in my life was both the thing that finally wrecked me and saved me. This forced me to recognise the level of my depression and also made me decide that I am through with being Sylvia Plath and that I was also done with hiding how I am from the people I love.

One of the reasons I started this blog was to find a way for me to let the people in my life know what I have been going through. I have rarely felt comfortable expressing how I feel in person which I think may have been the initial reason I turned to art, and explains the personal context of my artwork.

Once I recognized that I could not survive doing the show I was doing and that it was too late to just not do a show I had to scramble to find some idea that could come together quick and to a level that wouldn't cause me mortification. I turned back to my notebooks and started culling them for ideas. I decided to return to something I had done a bit at school and did enlarged versions of little sketches and words. Looking through them I saw in my tiny automatic sketches that the despair I currently felt had been seeping out of my brain onto the pages for a very long time.

While doing this work I realized that I have reached the finish of this artistic voyage through the sadder part of my brain. The sources of most of my pain are far in the past and I have addressed them in ways with which I am satisfied. I no longer feel that I am lost in the night and the fog, but I still haven't found my place. But not having found your place yet is still better than settling into the wrong place.