Strange Coincidences
Life is full of strange coincidences, weird tricks that the cosmos plays on you.
You suspect they mean something, but you’re damned if you can work out exactly what.
During my teens and twenties I used to be into art in a BIG way, but not the tasteful pretty fluffy art that we do, and which is linked to the right of this blog. Nope, I went to the dark side. My passion was for twisted art, horror, psychologically damaging, the really mind bending stuff that screws you up if you think about it. I cut my milk teeth on Giger and it was downhill from then on in. Dark art has always been my passion, specifically images involving masks (I have a big thing about masks, in case you hadn’t noticed), and depictions of scarring and images where half the face and/or skull is missing. The skull missing images turned into an obsession. Always with the right side of the head missing. I had no idea why, but I began to collect them. Paintings, sculptures, photographs. Gruesome stuff.
I always thought I was really screwed up. I mean it’s not normal for an eighteen year old to really like this stuff, right? And I was just a normal middle-class girl from the suburbs with a stable upbringing, so why the obsession, the scouring of the art-galleries and books for horror and deformity?
“Do I need a shrink?” I often thought. “Maybe there is something wrong with me.”
Well I should have listened to that voice telling me that there was something wrong, shouldn’t I?
Because unbeknown to me, at the time, a small tumour was growing inside my brain, which got larger and larger until it was so big it devoured a quarter of my head and eventually nearly killed me. And yes, it was on the right side of my head. Courtesy of a team of amazing brain surgeons seven years ago, I am still here, but now a large chunk of my skull is missing, and half my face is paralysed.
I have become, quite literally, my dark art. The scary sculpture with the half-missing face on my wall is now actually me.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not depressed or upset about this at all. I find it ironic, amusing, and possibly a bit profound.
Was it just a strange co-incidence? Or was my slowly dying brain desperately trying to communicate with me in the only way it knew how?
If I had really listened to my art, could I have understood what it was trying to tell me?
Rich shot with a gorgeous model last week called Rachel T. After chatting over lunch, it turned out that she was a qualified lawyer (like me), half deaf (just like me), and she had scarring and balance problems (again, as I do) because…wait for it…she had a brain tumour when she was younger, in exactly the same place as me. She even had the same pass-mark in her law degree as I did, and a passion for red platform fetish shoes in the same shoe size! Fate had come full circle - what was the statistical chance of me meeting another version of myself, but twenty years younger?
The moral of the story? Maybe these coincidences are not chance happenings. Maybe there IS a reason.
My message to you?
LISTEN to your art. What is it trying to tell you?
You suspect they mean something, but you’re damned if you can work out exactly what.
During my teens and twenties I used to be into art in a BIG way, but not the tasteful pretty fluffy art that we do, and which is linked to the right of this blog. Nope, I went to the dark side. My passion was for twisted art, horror, psychologically damaging, the really mind bending stuff that screws you up if you think about it. I cut my milk teeth on Giger and it was downhill from then on in. Dark art has always been my passion, specifically images involving masks (I have a big thing about masks, in case you hadn’t noticed), and depictions of scarring and images where half the face and/or skull is missing. The skull missing images turned into an obsession. Always with the right side of the head missing. I had no idea why, but I began to collect them. Paintings, sculptures, photographs. Gruesome stuff.
I always thought I was really screwed up. I mean it’s not normal for an eighteen year old to really like this stuff, right? And I was just a normal middle-class girl from the suburbs with a stable upbringing, so why the obsession, the scouring of the art-galleries and books for horror and deformity?
“Do I need a shrink?” I often thought. “Maybe there is something wrong with me.”
Well I should have listened to that voice telling me that there was something wrong, shouldn’t I?
Because unbeknown to me, at the time, a small tumour was growing inside my brain, which got larger and larger until it was so big it devoured a quarter of my head and eventually nearly killed me. And yes, it was on the right side of my head. Courtesy of a team of amazing brain surgeons seven years ago, I am still here, but now a large chunk of my skull is missing, and half my face is paralysed.
I have become, quite literally, my dark art. The scary sculpture with the half-missing face on my wall is now actually me.
Now don’t get me wrong. I’m not depressed or upset about this at all. I find it ironic, amusing, and possibly a bit profound.
Was it just a strange co-incidence? Or was my slowly dying brain desperately trying to communicate with me in the only way it knew how?
If I had really listened to my art, could I have understood what it was trying to tell me?
Rich shot with a gorgeous model last week called Rachel T. After chatting over lunch, it turned out that she was a qualified lawyer (like me), half deaf (just like me), and she had scarring and balance problems (again, as I do) because…wait for it…she had a brain tumour when she was younger, in exactly the same place as me. She even had the same pass-mark in her law degree as I did, and a passion for red platform fetish shoes in the same shoe size! Fate had come full circle - what was the statistical chance of me meeting another version of myself, but twenty years younger?
The moral of the story? Maybe these coincidences are not chance happenings. Maybe there IS a reason.
My message to you?
LISTEN to your art. What is it trying to tell you?
Labels: Rachel T
posted by Lin at 3:32 PM
1 Comments:
"The scary sculpture with the half-missing face on my wall"
Now that wouldn't perchance be the painting I gave you 20 years ago would it? :-)
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