I have put these series together here because for me they are somewhat related to each other in their progression. When I was younger, I experienced a few pretty horribly traumatic deaths of people who have been very close or related to me. They first struck me like a mac truck with the raw and ugly impermanence of nature’s dark design. In my experience of this I noticed how powerfully this inverted my mind and my dreams even worse so. I went through the stages just as you read about them but even more surreal than I could have expected. This in such a way especially with the nightmares that I started to become annoyed and trepidatious at the thought of going to sleep at all. I would have reoccurring dreams where the dead person, (my father in a most of these cases), and I were doing very realistic, normal mundane things as if all was fine and well and nothing had happened and life was as it was prior. They didn’t even feel like dreams and during them I was not aware that they were even dreams at all. Then always at some point during these dreams the person would realize they were dead because their form would start to slightly deform at first and then further to distort and their form would ripple and liquify into the atmosphere which would more greatly panic the person which would in turn panic me and this would just intensify until I would wake up feeling a strange state, difficult to express, like out of my body and not sure if I was even alive at all. So sometimes I would avoid sleep because of the internal drama it caused. Eventually I started to experience sleep deprivation from this which caused me to experience perhaps some slight of mind hallucinations and see these strange distorted spaghettified faces from my dreams in the middle of the day while awake in murky shadow corners of a room or under things in dark places. The experience of this continuing and even evolving somewhat on its own was pushing me near the edge of losing my grasp mentally & emotionally.
So being an artist of often imaginal subject matter there came a point that I decided I’ll just try to find a way to capture the feel of this in a series of paintings. I used different methods to arrive where I had completed a series of these "Shadow Portraits" & "Faces in Black Hole Minds" and felt that to some degree this was successful or at least to my satisfaction. During this time, as I really find space related documentaries or docuseries quite inspiring, I just really wondered if the mind had a similar nature to that of a black hole. Swallowing light, experiencing strange time distortions and perhaps during the experience of death that there is a great sea like infinity of timelessness what I would imagine an event horizon of the mind during death where time slows into suspension. it was just a thought. But I tend to look at how other things in and around my environment mirror things within, like these timeless natures which seem to be possessed within everything, to understand greater what the hell I am and what is going on with this business of the experience of existence to me. haha.
So, when I had created these paintings for this series 2 major things happened. 1, The horrible dream nightmare cycle stopped, just completely ended and hasn’t happened again since. So, there is a very profound example of art therapy. 2, I featured this work in gallery settings as well as other formats like album art- I realized to my surprise that some other people related to this work in a very meaningful and interesting way. This series had created some reactions in others similar to how this affected me, and some people could not be in the room with them. So clearly whatever I was experiencing was not completely unique and perhaps far from it. These subjects expanded outward almost inevitably into Shadow People territory which became an almost common thing as even a good deal of people in my friend groups experienced. I had attempted to do a detailed and comprehensive research study of this phenomenon from the most mundane to the most extraordinary and metaphysical or supernatural logic I could find regarding them. I did write this into an article format; however, writing has always been something I struggle deeply with, and nothing more was done with this work other than the artworks.
Regarding Dab Tsog, and the idea of S.U.N.D.S. (Sudden Unexpected Death Syndrome) ~these are a few other things which I allowed to creep into this area because I feel that they are somewhat related and at least they have inflamed my thoughts whilst painting away. I believe they are interesting topics to explore because they are again, some form of perceivable manifestation of the imaginal which are expressed to have real effects on the material life in a supernatural way often as a sort of nightmarish horror, boogeyman like expression. Whether this phenomenon is some sort of common psychological expression of the minds effects or be it some force of nature who can say for sure, but it has occupied many thoughts during the work on this series.
