09.03
A DEMON IN MY BED – NOSTALGIC REVISIT (acrylic & mixed media on canvas).
“A Demon In My Bed” – the finished piece.
Scouring through my backlog of photos on computer file – and came across these pics of my painting of “A Demon In My Bed’ for the Bundaberg Regional Art Gallery (BRAG) exhibition “Fragments of Vision” 2011. I always take a photo at each stage of painting. Well, at least I have done so for the past 5 years. Sometimes I look back on what I did, and think that the painting was better before I went too far, and ruined it. Not in this case – I was happy with the end results, and think I managed to pull away before I stuffed it up. The work was inspired by a nightmare I had in 2011. One morning I woke with a demon on my back, and it was violating me sexually. In the dream, it took this position here, but after that, began shoving its bulbous head up my rectum. It was terrifying, as I thought I was awake – then finally woke properly in a cold sweat. I think maybe it was a manifestation of what I was going through at the time – marriage break-up, loss of my university tutoring job the same week, and severe eye trauma resulting in permanent vision loss of 90% in each eye (optic nerve damage). Thankfully, it is now stable – I still have an amazing 10% sight left in each eye – and my life is going well. I never thought about sight before I lost most of it. Now, I rejoice in the beauty of what I still can see, and celebrate it in doing art.
