Outside our small safe place flies Mystery... A snake beneath the forest floor, a whisper: Melusine

There are a lot of spooky images in my old portfolios at home that will make people wonder about my sanity.  Looking back on them, I realize that they are more than just the dark side of me showing through, these are pieces that explore a kind of poetry that is like a testimony of my struggles with manic depression.  I'll give you a full explanation of each image and let's see if you agree:

 

1.  Title: "Personal Siberia"

Date:  1993

Medium: Pen & Ink, Mixed Media

I found an old, decaying map of Siberia and used white out, coffee stains, and even a little piece of metallic blue ribbon slicing out a mournful figure in white to express the kind of isolation I felt from the rest of humanity.  The figure drawn in ball point pen on the inside of the larger, obscure white figure is in an uncomfortable fetal position.  Below reads the following:

"This is my Personal Siberia"

1. Coffee Stains on my tongue

2.  My skin irritates

3.  His eyes are full of oranges

4.  I frown with California

5.  My mother is a lunatic

6.  Unknown Sisters

7.  A Dark Moon on a grave

8.  Lost anger and stories

9.  the ice on a back step

10.  YOU AND ME

"A journey within myself -- the map to my heart makes no sense -- I can't see anything anyway -- Everything is cold and warm at the same time -- this story I have to tell without speaking out loud"

 

2.  Title: "Wolfbrother"

Date:  1992

Medium: Chalk Pastel

My relationships with men have been strained at times, even the good guys I've dated become strange to me.  At the time I painted this, I was feeling a distance growing between my partner and I.  He was not the guy I thought he was.  He started to make very conservative judgements, treated me as if I were stupid, and made me feel like a "kept" woman when he wouldn't allow me to make any suggestions or contribute anything to our joint finances.  He told me we would have three children.  I didn't like someone making decisions like that about my body.  He didn't consult me.  He just let it be known that I would give birth to three children.  Whatever.  Soon after that, I stopped having sex with him.  We slept in separate rooms.  It was then that I knew I was not going to be his woman.  Living with him was like living with a shadow -- this man who would creep into the house late at night whom I'd watch leave early in the morning without a good-bye kiss.  This painting is the silent witness to the beginning of an end to that relationship.

 

3.  Title: "Dark Wings"

Date:  1992

Medium: Colored Pencil, Ink, Collage

"She ties a ribbon about the sky like a weeping, morbid rainbow promising lies..."  So the writing at the top of this painting goes.  "She" was a character dancing around in my head.  One of those personalities I made up called "Dedra" who was something of a ghost goddess.  I envisioned her as a real character, an unknown newly born Goddess who was about to destroy the world on a selfish whim.  She wasn't after any fame or glory, she was just a neglected spirit seeking to get the pesky humans bothering her off her back.  "The darkness waves its wings to fly...  And a kitten dreams of a stranger she once knew.  LASHES FRECKLED with sea salt..."  There was no real plot to the story that accompanied this image, Dead of Winter.  It was a total "theatre of the absurd" surrealist piece that clearly shows how much reading Samuel Beckett's work had an influence on me.  At the bottom of the image I wrote "Lost Babe Wonderland IN THE Woundedland" talking about the death of innocence of the woman who dares to walk naked into the woods alone.  Her woundedness is the reason she becomes a wilderness all to herself.

 

4.  Title:  "Nightmare"

Date: 1994

Medium: Ink

Inspired by feminist angst, I drew this banshee wild and hungry for justice ripping through the shadows with claws of glass and metal.  Her hands were that of a corpse, yet so much of the rest of her body is missing, her throat is torn off and her head is that of a beautiful woman, someone who may very well be The Morrigan Herself.  She has no mercy.

 

5.  Title: "Why Do Our Chosen Not Choose Us?"

Date:  1995

Medium: Ink

"...and I bleed water.  Like solid silver.  Vommitting silver...  I have lost myself."  It is all about the asking why those we love don't love us back.  I have often felt like the vampire in this picture holding a frozen corpse.  No matter how hard she wished for her love to return from death, he did not.  He would not take her blood.  His very body rejected what keeps her undead.

 

6.  Title:  "Unfinished Birds"

Date: 2002

Medium: Watercolors

According to Ojibwe legend, all the birds on this Earth were once spirits of the Sun who were granted form through the Creator's dreams.  This painting was supposed to accompany a collection of native stories, but since the project ended, so this painting remained unfinished and nearly forgotten.  I like it the way it is.  A ghostly impression of a colorful crowd of birds beaming out of sunlight.

 

7.  Title:  "Unknown"

Date: 1993

Medium: Ink

I was comparing relationships to vampire stories -- how beautiful it was to be a victim to my own desires, and how beautiful it is when the object of your desires becomes a monster.

 

8.  Close up of the vampire-monster-boyfriend embracing and breaking its lover.

 

9.  Title:  "Cobalt Blue Cat"

Date: 1993

Medium: Acrylic

I used my own cat, Nightshade, for this image.  He had a great impact on my life.  A very magical, mystical cat of the like I'll never see again.

 

10.  Title:  "page from private journal"

Date: 1992

Medium: Ink

I obviously have had some serious issues with relationships here.  The holding of hands becomes more than just a trite image of romance, it becomes a bloody, messy, complicated, dripping thing.

 

11.  Title:  "Dark Face"

Date: 1996

Medium: Lithograph print

Whoever she is, she came out of the ink on accident, a face out of a finger painting.

 

12.  Title:  "The Mirror"

Date: 1997

Medium: Intaglio

I was fascinated with corsets and the history of cosmetics at the time I created this intaglio plate.  I tried to make the woman in this image antique, tightly constricted by her corset, and struggling to comb her hair while a thousand eyes mock her.

 

13.  Title:  "Dream Embrace"

Date: 1994

Medium: Watercolor, ink, acrylics

Earth and Sky collide as lovers.

 

14.  Close up of Earth's face

15.  Close up of Sky's face

 

16.  Title:  "All My Heroes Wear Masks"

Date:  1992

Medium: Collage

Weary of chasing boys, I realize that all my favorite heroes, not just the superheroes in my treasured comic books, wore masks.  I never got to know them because they were too busy hiding who they really were from me.  I lived only in the surface of their lives.  For the life of me I still do not know why some men prefer to live their lives behind a facade and not be for real. 

 

17.  Close up of self portrait with a broken bird's wing at the bottom of "All My Heroes Wear Masks"

 

Reviewing these images, I must say that this is the way I write poetry.  This is a testament to what I've gone through.  The images are dark, but I am not unhappy.  I'm proud of what I've survived and will continue to be my own woman.