The Drawing out of 105 Personal Demons: An Exploration of Personal Darkness Through Mindless Drawing

Our demons begin infesting us early in life―around the time we’re infants, before we can walk or talk, when the bottle or breast takes a long threatening time to arrive, not to mention, in the case of men, having your foreskin sliced off. They say we don’t remember these things and maybe we don’t, at least not consciously. But everything that happens to us is recorded somewhere in our bodies or minds, and some part of us never forgets them. It’s in these regions of our being that most of our personal demons reside and nibble away at us like an itch beyond scratching until the day we release them.

But sometimes we’re reluctant to release them, a fact that used to baffle me until I got some much-needed counseling from a psychologist who spent most of our sessions talking about Monty Python. The psychologist recommended a few books that I could read to find out what was going on in my head; thus, freeing up more session time to talk about Monty Python.

This is what I learned from those books―we get used to misery. In fact, we get so used to it that we’ll sometimes do everything in our power to stay miserable because it’s the devil we know and God help us if we ever had to be happy. Like, happy day after day.

So we let our demons rampage through our personal horizons until we go nuts, die, or change our minds about the misery thing.

From an artistic point, I think our demons give texture and dimension to our lives. They make us interesting and they make life interesting when they’re not killing us or making our lives unbearably interesting.

The Drawing Out of 105 Personal Demons is an exploration of personal darkness through mindless drawing...105 mindless drawings.

For more about this project, download the free ebook. This book documents the demons and the process used to create them.

The demons, all 105 of them will be on display at Studio4Ward from July 5 to 30 beginning with this summer's first Culture Crawl.