Sooooooo a couple of days ago, my friend Heather told me of this art show thing called “Touched By Fire“, which is an online art gallery specifically for people with mood disorders, sponsored by like, the Mood Disorder Association of Ontario or something like that. Along with the online gallery, they have an actual art show in November and she figured I’d be interested.

So I went to the site and looked at everything and saw that they’d actually EXTENDED the call for entries for the show to THIS COMING FRIDAY. Well, that was too soon for me to paint anything new, so I asked the buyer of “Hope” and “Dream” if she’d mind if I submitted those two for showing and she said that was cool, so figuring this whole thing was too karmic to pass up, yesterday morning I did.

Then I got thinking about the theme of the show and decided I should submit the painting I made when I was psychotic, which I’ve been calling “Camp Tampon” all these years that most of you have seen before. I mean, I figured if there was ever a time and place to show it and maybe even sell it, Touched By Fire was probably it.

So yesterday I dragged it out of the bedroom - the thing’s 30 x 36 and weighs a ton (truthfully, I’m not even sure how to hang it so I never have) - and set it up on my easel to dust it and fix some things that had come loose in the last couple of years, as it was moved around a lot during its lifetime. Then I sprayed it with a final coat of Krylon in a few places and then Madison helped me drag it out onto the driveway so I could take better pictures of it for submission.

What sucks is that they only allow you to submit one picture per piece, so this is the one I submitted, which kind of sucks because it doesn’t really do the complexity of the piece justice. I mean, this sucker is manic chaos on canvas:

The contrast between that piece and everything else I’ve ever painted, I think, perfectly illustrates how my thought process was so fucked when I was manic, which I was when I started the painting and by the time I was finished, I was in the throes of psychosis. In fact, I deemed in “done” approximately 4 hours before the ambulance came to take me away. This painting started it all.

For the sake of the show and to better illustrate what the painting is about (since they don’t give you a place to explain), I renamed it “Mania in the Key of Psychosis” when I submitted it and I put a price tag of $500 on it because….why the hell not? It’s been sitting in my house for almost 3 years collecting dust and truthfully, I don’t even want to part with it and while I doubt anyone would buy it anyway, that’s how much it’ll cost for me to part with it. Also, there’s like, easily $200 worth of materials in there, if only in the gems alone. (Yes, you heard me, GEMS.)

This is a Herkimer diamond, bottom middle of the painting:

Beside the Herkimer diamond is Hello Kitty and *real* aquamarine growing on another piece of rock:

Why I put these in the painting, I have no idea. I was out of my head. I suspect it was because they were gifts and the thing that made me finally snap and go over the edge was my birthday. That’s why the painting is full of wax and sparkly star confetti and birthday candles.

This is a….well, it’s a very very racist “Black Americana” salt shaker, holding a key. If I hadn’t done that to him, I could have sold him on eBay for about $150, they’re super collectible. This one was my great grandma’s:

Here’s the pepper shaker he’s supposed to be holding (bottom right of the painting):

I cut up my driver’s licence and threw that in too, probably due to frustration at being suddenly afraid to drive and isolated as a result:

Something about the tampons…I wasn’t scheduled for my period when this was all happening. There is no doubt that my mania/psychosis was partly fueled by PMS because for the first 3 days I was in the hospital (that I barely remember) I literally laid in bed, in kind of a yoga pose and bled all over their sheets, kind of out of defiance, like “fine, I’m just gonna sit here and bleed then”. My shrink has since told me that there’s a link between mania, psychosis and estrogen and it’s probably not a coincidence that this all culminated the way it did. And by tampons in the painting, my brain somehow knew that this was part of it, but I didn’t.

Another piece of my licence, with my signature:

A button, which some of you have probably seen before. It says, “Well Aren’t We Just a Ray of Fucking Sunshine?” I think Ditsy gave this to me:

A cigarette butt and pills I painted pink, but which exploded with the moisture. There are also moonflower seeds in there (bottom left of the painting):

Tampon, baby Jesus, sunglasses:

Unhappy face. My psyche knew something was wrong, but the rest of me didn’t. In fact it was like there were two of me and one was trapped inside:

A box with paint, an eyedropper, more tampons, string and barrettes:

A box lid full of painted nails, cigarette butt upper left corner:

Same thing, different angle:

Other materials used: acrylic paint/paint bottles, burnt match sticks, A Million Little Pieces by James Frey (top left), bubble wrap (bottom), string/thread/various fibres, a jar full of scented candle wax, a compact, a Coke can, dried baby’s breath, a toothbrush, o.b. tampon wrappers…and so much more.

So yeah. That’s what crazy looks like. Every tiny piece of….ephemera….I put in there meant something at the time, but a lot of the meaning is lost now, as I don’t remember everything from that period.

I have a huge bag of pills that I’ve amassed over the last 18 months, leftovers from the stuff my shrink’s made me try and I debated adding all of those to the piece, but in the end I decided not to alter it from its original state except to reattach a few of the paint bottles that had fallen down just because of their own weight and only being originally stuck there by paint and varnish.

Anyway, I’m really curious to see what these Touched By Fire people are going to think of it, especially in contrast with the other two pieces I submitted and in light of the whole theme of the show.

If accepted, I don’t know if I’ll be able to go to the actual show. I mean, it’s in Toronto and yes, we would be physically able to get there and everything but I looked at the pictures from last year’s event and there were like, 300 people all crammed into the space and I dunno if I can deal with that. I don’t think is mandatory to go to the show or anything, but there is a really big part of me hoping my stuff gets rejected so I for sure don’t have to. :o/

I guess we’ll see what happens.

(Originally posted on Live Journal, last week.)