PAIN
Watercolour, gouache, ink, pen, graphite on watercolour paper.
56cm x 82cm.
PAIN
Intense emotional pain is visceral. It wells from the body’s core, swells and saturates until the thorax threatens to rent apart disgorging all vital organs in a flood of torn body matter and blood.
Pain is truth. No deception there. Engineered by the heart pain is the response to the soul’s scream on impact with an event of colossal import.
Pain shatters our internal world forcing life’s energy to take erratic orbits through thick blackness. So deeply lost in those regions we believe that we have no choice but to be consumed by Black. Nihilistic demons cast spells that cause us to lose completely any sense of our being human. We choke – asphyxiated by severance from our life force.
Pain is felt as a welling of waves that refuse to break. Its energy is steadfast feeding from an infinite source relentlessly making new wave after new wave out of its own body. Pain is wave held for eternity in an unexploded state of climax.
Pain is self engineered. It’s the soul’s response to horror at an event never met with before, an event unimaginable, filled with cruelty, underserved, an event never expected.
Pain arises at betrayal; a lie; loss; impotence; dismissal of our humanity as not worthy of consideration. The cause breaches the great well of pain. The walls break letting out pain’s full power to over-run us. We are utterly overwhelmed, utterly broken. We have little choice but to be dragged into the deep abyss.
But we do have a choice.
We can ignore and smother pain. But it will lie in wait for every opportunity to infiltrate and pollute our conscious and sub-conscious lives. We live life through a screen of numbing filters that poison the kernels of vibrant existence.
Or, we can meet pain head on; ride its currents, use its energy to steer us into new waters.
We can choose to embrace pain and use it to help us select a new trajectory, sling-shot around the gapping chasms of utter desperation, through loss, furious anger, wishes for the final annihilation of whatever remains of our fractured being, on into a landscape of infinite possibilities.
The purging of pain, over time, empowers memory, through re-creation to render the cause harmless. Purging doesn’t erase the memory itself but offers an opportunity to reclaim the memory anew. Freshly made, corruption expunged the memory becomes the foundation stone of building strength.
This pain is grief over what might have been, but could never be: grief at a lost possibility, an opportunity so heedlessly squandered by having its half realised state satisfied by a corrupt source. Dis-ease can only ensue. This is of no consequence to me – this is not my future!