Poem: Rewind Me Back To The Nineties

Rewind Me Back To The Nineties

If I search the recesses of my memory
I can recall a time before childhood trauma
was all the rage and we were blissfully
ignorant of how those we looked up to
as mavericks and rebels with or without causes
who opted for the crazy life suffered genuinely
from one or another personality disorder,
a schizo-this or complex-that, and the substances
they helped romanticise were really just
non-prescription meds helping them regulate
wild emotions or sedate their inner demons.

A time when each of us felt empowered to
do as we pleased and to go our own way,
not knowing how these choices, in truth,
were the dictates of neurological damage
or that our carpe diem paths were actually
well-trodden tracks leading to reservoirs
of shame which would overwhelm our mid-
life sense of self-worth while contributing
to the freakiest nightmares and breakdowns.

Today there are more than two hundred
classified forms of mental illness – so many
you feel like if you’re not getting with the whole
credential-accumulation game with your
little Fitbit and ultra-woke attitude then
you have a responsibility both to yourself
and others to reassess your life or get used to
being told you’re in denial.

Oh, rewind me
back to the nineties, when dysfunctional
was so much better than just functional,
critics didn’t begrudge artistic catharsis
and to be an in-your-face fuck-up –
yeah, nah, that was sweet as.

–

Free PDF Ebook Reissue of My 2002 Book of Poems “Manure”

I’ve finished scanning to PDF my second handmade chapbook Manure, added an author’s note to give the title and poetry some context for the reader, and made it available to freely download from this site by going to the Media Page and clicking on the link under it’s cover image.

Continuing Along with Painting and Chigong

Zhineng Chigong was working well for me, so the following year I learnt the second method, otherwise known as “Body/Mind Form”. It involves a lot more stretching and opening up of the meridian channels than the first method. I was devoting two to three hours of every day to chigong. I was taking steps to change my diet, as I had read a graphic novel called “Epileptic” in which the author writes about his being brought up with a brother who had severe epilepsy, and his parents’ struggle to try to find an alternative treatment for him. Their journey at one point lead them to stay at a Macrobiotic commune, where the author’s brother enjoyed quite a lengthy period without seizures, until the commune had to move off the land, and so was fractured, leaving him and his family having to search for another solution.

I just happened to be looking on a clearance table in a bookstore one day, when I came across “The Macrobiotic Way” by Michio Kushi. I think it was marked down to ten dollars; what a bargain for such a great little book! I had been struggling with my diet, as taking Tegretol had made be somewhat irregular, and a diet based on whole grains just seemed to make perfect sense to me. I had decreased my tegretol dosage a little by now, and was taking 100mg fast release in the morning, and 400mg slow release in the evening (as I have nocturnal epilepsy).

I had taken it upon myself to seek out a part time job, which I knew would be tough, considering the arthritis, the need to wear shades to prevent my eyes both from bright light and from dryness, and the fatigue. I got in touch with a local agency set up to help those with disabilities find jobs, and long story short, I got a permanent part time position with a market research company, which allowed me to work from home. The idea of “cold calling” and the thought of having to deal with disgruntled respondents didn’t bother me, as I saw the opportunity to put into practice some of those Toltec and Chigong principles and techniques I had been learning, in order to stay calm and focused in tense situations.

The extra money I was earning allowed me to fund my own solo exhibition in an underground gallery which had just started up in the central city at the time, called simply “The Room”:

      

            

      

      

The show was called “Swallow Or Be Swallowed”, a quote I had taken from Joseph Campbell whose books i was reading at the time which seemed to sum up the attitude one needs on the healing and artistic journey.

Basquiat, Dubuffet, and Cy Twombly were heavily influencing my stylistic and technical approach at the time. I had found in Neo-Expressionism a way to release my anxiety, and to create large paintings (A1 or A2 size) which could communicate in a very graphic way thought feelings and ideas as they arose.

I was still dissatisfied with the lack of consistency of style and theme.

I was hoping to find a way of resolving this issue, and to have another show at The Room in maybe 6 to 8 months. Little did I know, however, what was in store for Christchurch City…

 

Developing My Skills

From when I left off in my previous post until I was diagnosed with Sjogren’s Syndrome, I didn’t have the burden of arthritis to hold me back, and it was a great journey in learning oil painting.  Having no teachers, and not being able to afford any even if I wanted lessons, I used to go to the public library a lot and look at Cezanne, Picasso, Van Gogh, and Modigliani to try to figure out their processes, and aesthetic theories. Here are some of my efforts:

      

 

I also took the time to experiment a bit:

      

 

I was just showing these works at local cafes. I was living in the inner city then, in a bedsit for a while, and then in a very grungy flat on Peterborough Street, apparently only a few houses away from where Phillip Clairmont once lived.

Being unemployed, I used to try to save money by turning the hot water cylinder off (which meant cold showers in winter), never using heating, hardly ever cooking,and skipping breakfast.

My daily routine consisted of going to a cafe, ordering a latte bowl, reading and writing poetry, and once I had the caffeine hit, I would go to the library, look at paintings, and then return home to paint for the rest of the afternoon. At this time in Christchurch, if you were an unemployed artist, you could get what was called the “Artist Wage”, which was overseen by the charitable trust known as “Creation”. If you were on it you had to be actively engaged in artistic projects and meet each week with organisers and fellow artists to discuss your progress.

My projects weren’t about the painting though, they were about self publishing books of poetry, and I managed to turn out three books while on the artist wage. Not that I’m very proud of that poetry now, but going through that process was indeed educational.

I should mention here that the epileptic seizures I was having were really starting to take their toll, so much so that I tried my first medication for it, Epilim, which seemed to be working, but what it was doing was delaying the seizures, so that I would have one every two months, and even more fierce than before.

I was put on what was known then as the sickness benefit, and I stopped taking the Epilim. Feeling pretty disillusioned with the options for epilepsy meds, I decided to again go without, but the art development continued:

    

     

 

It wasn’t long before a seizure would give me a back injury, which would see me bed-ridden for a few months, and having about 6 months of physio, where I learnt some basic Pilates to strengthen the core muscles to where they needed to be.

I opted again to try epilepsy medication, this time 600mg of Tegretol, which thankfully stopped the seizures, but also saw the introduction of fatigue and dryness. I had already been experiencing rheumatism previously, which was the result of taking Roaccutane, a medication which was prescribed for me to clear up acne, which I would get on my neck and back quite a lot. Before taking Roaccutane I had a blood test, which showed an antibody which meant that I could get a form of Lupus around the age of 40. They told me that taking Roaccutane could bring this on sooner, but I wasn’t bothered, and opted to take it anyway.

The memory of this was what helped the doctors know what to test for when I was getting the symptoms of dryness, fatigue, and arthritis. It wasn’t Lupus, but another member of the auto-immune family, Sjogren’s Syndrome.

When the diagnosis came, I was told that it was incurable, which was very depressing when I tried to consider how I would be able to write and paint. But at least now I had some understanding of what was happening to me. I accepted that I needed the Tegretol to stop the seizures, but was more wary now than ever of harmful side effects of pharmaceuticals, so decided against taking meds for Sjogrens, hoping to find a better way.

The Slippery Slope: How I Fell for Painting and Poetry

For my first blog I thought it best to give some background on how I got into art.

I was brought up in the port town of Timaru in the 1980s which was devoid of any inspiration for a kid to become an artist of any kind. When I was about 6 years old I can remember at the end of class, on a friday, the teacher told us that on Monday we were all going to draw trees. I walked home looking at each tree on the way thinking “How could anyone draw that?”.

On the Sunday evening the anxiety which had been building up all weekend could no longer be contained and I burst into tears. I told my mother the reason, and she, knowing dad could draw a bit, got him to give me my first drawing lesson. Begin with the trunk, some branches from that, and smaller branches from those, and it’s done. I fet like something magical had happened. I could now create my own trees!

I went to school on Monday full of confidence, but to my disappointment, we just had to collect leaves and do rubbings of them in crayon.

It was around that time my interest in comics began to grow, especially in UK comics like Whizzer and Chips, Beano, and Whoopee. In learning how to copy their styles I was learning how to create my own people, and hence, my own worlds.

In High School art classes they taught us how to sketch and shade objects from life. I was a very timid drawer, with my whole focus being on accuracy, and not wanting to make a mistake.

They also tried to teach us to draw in a cubist with charcoal, which I hated. I also hated painting with the crappy brushes and poster paint acrylics they gave us.

I had been told enough times that you can’t make a living from art anyway, so I turned my attention to commercial art. I wanted to be like those illustrators I was seeing on movie posters etc at the time, and decided to apply for a three year diploma course in graphic design and illustration.

I had to move to Christchurch to attend the course, which was the proverbial cutting of the umbilical cord. It wasn’t long into the course that I started to realise that I enjoyed the creative problem solving process of graphic design more than illustration. We were also taught to use the standard software of the time, such as Pagemaker, Freehand, Illustrator, and Photoshop.

I used to love using photoshop to layer up textures from photos and photocopied stuff and play around with transparencies and filters. Dave McKean’s Sandman illustrations were very influencial then, as were David Carson’s experimental deconstructivist Raygun designs.

They also taught us a brief history of Modern art, and we had drawing tutors who were thriving local artists in their own right, such as Sandra Thompson, Dee Copland, Graham Bennett, and Cheryl Lucas. Drawing became something far more than sketching, and I realised my tendency to be so obsessed with accuracy and to make timid marks needed mending.

I became interested in oil painters of the past such as Cezanne, Turner, and Giacometti. I could see how oil painting allowed for a kind of layering up akin to what I was doing in Photoshop, except that it would be a stroke by stroke, intuitive method which produces a one off original work.

I was a bit disillusioned with the reality of being a graphic designer, and decided to teach myself oil painting by looking closely at those painters from the past that I suddenly had a great appreciation for.

Here are a few of my earliest efforts:

    

I now also had time to begin reading and writing poetry, performing it at open mic nights, and self publishing books printed out on a deskjet printer.

The funny thing is that poetry was really my first love, and sales of paintings were really only intended to fund the self-publishing of poems.

It was while the diploma course that I began having tonic clonic seizures at night, and once the course was over I went and got the diagnosis that I was dreading, but resisted the doctor’s suggestion to go on medication for it, thinking that I would either live in spite of it, or just think of it as a natural part of me which shouldn’t be suppressed.

This meant that I couldn’t get a job, which meant I was poor, which to me, meant that I was on the right path to becoming a decent poet/artist in the bohemian mould, like these guys: