Cat Rocketship • This is a hugely personal post. Most of the time I...

This is a hugely personal post. Most of the time I post a painting without much commentary, but I’m also trying to shape this blog into going deeper into talking about the pieces I make. And sometimes background makes a painting much lusher.

I wrapped this painting up in March, and enjoyed exploring new media on it. The oogly bruisey goodness is a really successful usage of Dorland’s Wax Medium - a product I have used before and decided to revisit on this project - and lots of loose pigments. Jacquard dyes, metallic dyes, and crushed up chalk, mostly.

This is the most personal painting in this body - the whole body of work in Demons and Worse Things being about fear. I decided to explore fear after the nasty scooter accident I had in the winter of 2009. Fear bubbled up in me in unfamiliar ways, and went on simmering for just about a year; long after I started work on this show. It was the dominant emotion for most of that time.

They say that traumatic memories are created because of an overload - the exact way it was explained to me was that when all you can think during an event, accident, attack is “This can’t be happening”, that’s when your brain is in the PTSD danger zone.

For the first 18 hours after my accident, that was just about all I thought. I laid on the sidewalk and thought it. I laid in my hospital bed and it raced through my head. And even after my brain comprehended that my body would be “okay”, there were months of feeling exhausted and fragile and sometimes so pained that I couldn’t take it. It was a new experience, all over. It was scary.

So, how does this all come back to this painting? The whole year left me feeling so breakable. I’ve been injured before - I am the princess of broken bones - but before this nothing had me laid out, in the hospital for five days and hallucinating about Barack Obama giving me ambulance-ride pep talks. I also felt - and this feels shallow to admit, but here I go - so ugly. My face swelled, I gained fat and lost muscle, and my leg was (still is) lumpy and scarred. Given both of these thoughts - fragility and, I guess, vanity - I’m pleased with the delicate lines of this piece and their juxtaposition with the grainy, gloopy, scary, waxy bruises that can’t be contained in the leg.

Whew. And now I am mentally wiping my brow after writing all that. Thank you for read it all!