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.

Get Published in 2012

Getting published could be the hardest thing you’ll ever do—or the easiest. Get Published in 2012 prepares you to search for publishers or agents the right way, without wasting time. You’ll learn how to identify and contact the right publishers for your work (fiction or non-fiction); how to prepare a publishing toolkit, including a publisher tracking sheet, long and short synopses, query and covering letters, author bio and publication history (even if you don’t already have anything published).

You’ll learn how to prepare a marketing plan for those publishers who demand them in the submission process. You’ll also learn how to receive free critiques of your work, how to deal with rejection and how to avoid scams. We’ll look at traditional forms of publishing, self-publishing and electronic publishing.

Everyone will also receive a free copy of eMarketing Tools for Writers, 3rd Edition.

Instructor: Biff Mitchell
Date: Saturday, January14
Time: 10 AM till 4:30 PM (with a one hour break at noon)
Place: Studio4Ward, 384 Queen Street (across from City Hall)
Workshop Fee: $60
To enroll or learn more, call 455-BIFF (2433) or email biff@biffmitchell.com.