I just cleaned out my old closet and found four boxes FULL of old artwork I did back in High School. Yes, most of it is fucking awful compared to what I'm probably capable of today. What the Hell did I really know back in those days? Digging up moldy and torn sketches of my friends, a couple of still-life images of a glass bong, an improperly mounted and primed painting (made before I even knew that you HAD to mount and prime a canvas before you could paint on it) of my High School God: Marilyn Manson.
I guess you can still see paint "scribbles" on the unfinished concrete floor, most of them have been there since 1999.
I was pretty heavy into Evangelical Christianity as a teen, which was all kinds of awkward for me because at around the same time I discovered Jesus, I also fell head over heels for the work of Swiss artist H R Giger. I also began to eventually realize that despite what my purity-pledging friends insisted, my vagina did in fact very much enjoy having something comfortably nestled inside of it. Later on in college I fell out of favor with Christianity all together and embraced marijuana, drum circles and the far-less-threatening path of Wicca. I meandered and meditated on the phases of the moon, mystical properties of herbs and trying to store my "energy" in crystals for almost 11 years: I used to be a member of a Circle back in Portland Maine being led by a man who apparently still calls himself "Z" and has moved his base of operations to nearby Westbrook.
Don't waste your breath talking to them, last I heard their official platform is that I never existed.
After a string of VERY fucked up incidents during my deployment, on top of reading some work by Hitchens and Dawkins, I tossed religion aside for good just in time for my 30th birthday. I'm now out of the Army and staying with family up in Maine, but now after going through all this ... STUFF ... it's such a weird feeling sifting through such badly rendered visual representations of things I no longer believe in (or even want anything to do with.) Not only that, but all of my artwork depicting my inner conflict and turmoil of just being a misguided and sexually repressed teenager is just disturbing as shit to look back at.
How bad could it possibly have been?
Okay, a little odd but not so horrible, right?
The whole Virgin vs. Slut thing, yes that is in fact a severed Barbie leg. A cut-out from a clothing catalog and a postage stamp featuring Mary and Jesus on either end of this strange collage I made in the summer of 1999: I had my first boyfriend that year, his name was Nate. Well, how about something else?
That's Satan boiling a Furby alive! I still don't trust those little fuckers, but considering THIS drawing was done using ONLY MARKERS (and a mechanical pencil) I thought it was pretty damn good at the time.
I had a MAD crush on this one dude and so I made all kinds of crazy pictures to try and catch his attention. Images like THIS coupled with scenarios like THAT might otherwise unnerve most people, however he was the one who got me hooked on Nine Inch Nails, TOOL, Marilyn Manson and other things my Pastor told me to steer clear of. We may have fooled around once, maybe twice, back in the day, but nothing really came about it between us aside from an outlet for angst and the very slow dawning of critical thinking.
Shall we move on?
Oh my...
... Um, yes that is exactly what it looks like: A dragon vigorously fondling a bound and gagged hermaphrodite.
I'm not going to bull-shit with you, I had some SERIOUS ISSUES with sexual identity as a teen: Suppressing sexual curiosity and desire doesn't kill it, it just makes it stronger (and weirder) until SOMETHING bursts forth into the real world. I will say this, I regret not finishing this one if only because I want to see if I can bring myself to do so without choking on my own laughter.
Hey, I did this next one after college...
Holy shit, it's Moogle-thulu! Hahaha, I can't believe I still have this! Anyone want to buy it?
I only lasted one year at Maine College of Art, the other students were (at the time) a bunch of yuppie-scum trust-fund-eating hipsters who made it abundantly clear that I was not going to be welcome among their cliques. The leather-clad metal-head living in a house full of vegans had very few friends indeed, but I found ways to cope. I should note that my first week of college 9-11 happened, and boy it fucked EVERYONE up.
One more, okay? It's nothing too weird, I promise.
I painted this rather comical Self Portrait back in 2006, to this day I think it's one of my best pieces ever.
In truth, this is a close-up shot of the original painting. It's painted on a perfectly square wooden panel, which is considerably more expensive than canvas but I find that I have a lot more creative leeway with a more solid surface. It still has to be mounted and primed, but unlike canvas it won't stretch or tear and I like that: A great piece of work should last a long time.
There were A LOT of boxes of old, unfinished and decayed artwork. Some of it was too badly damaged to pick up without tearing, a few doodles somehow managed to remain absolutely immaculate since High School: It's a bit like taking a time-machine into an art gallery.
I have LOTS MORE images, I'll do another post at some point in the future.
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