2025.05 EXHIBIZONE.COM

THEME: EYES - ONTARIO/CANADA/online

THE BACK STORY

TITLE: SUCIDE IS NOT AN OPTION

          With advancing medical technology I have learned that I am considered “on the spectrum” as most, if not all, creative people are.  It is my belief my life would have been very different with this information “back in my day.”  I like who I am and despite medical technology, I’m glad to have become the person I am. This painting was in another composition in 2023.

          About 1968-69, I found myself in a deep depression. I had strange headaches with lighting bolt type pain which radiated from the base of my neck to the top of my skull. It was terrifying. My mother believed it was because I was smoking grass.  At that time, I thought perhaps I’d drive my car into one of the canals which was part of the Louisiana landscape as one way out of my pain. This painting was based on an image I saw from the movie Romeo and Juliette which came out just at the time I was introduced to my soon to become and now former, husband. 

          I found myself on the psychotic floor of a local hospital “because there were no beds available in any other part of the hospital”. As I’d just spent 7 years in a boarding school, I thought I’d never get out of this new forced confinement. My head hunt: I wasn’t insane. I painted while in my hospital room and wouldn’t speak to anyone for fear of saying something that would keep me there longer. Of all my friends who knew I was there, only my new friend, and later husband, came to see me and he did that every day. I looked on his as my way out of the hospital and a way to get away from my family. I didn’t know that the marriage that occurred a few months later was a Jewish community arraigned married and that I was going from one hole into yet another. All along I knew that “suicide was not an option” for me, not then nor ever.

MEDIUM: ACRYLIC ON CANVAS

SIZE: 48”x 60” - 121.92cm x 152.40 - YEAR: 1976