(Written in January 2006)
Saw Lore yesterday. I wanted to do a “self-portrait” like we had done at Woman’s Way. She had a roll of paper but it wasn’t wide enough. I said let’s make it in two halves. She said “then you can do a center” and showed me an image in one of her books. We cut the paper and drew the outline in the bathroom. Lore cut a third piece of paper to be the center panel. When I started working on it I drew zigzags for my broken ankle and wrist, eyes with tears, then black craypa to make depression blanketing my head (right side) & down my body. I wrote WOUNDED, BROKEN in the margin. I made a red heart, then drew spears & arrows piercing it, made a halo of zigzags around the head & wrote TERROR. Then I tore out the groin area and wrote DESTROYED! Then I put down my head and burst into tears. (I was surprised at how much anger and grief I felt.) Then I started going thru Lore’s box of images to find ones I could use.
When I came home, I pinned it up on my easel, added some more black craypa, began cutting out images and placing them. I need a lot more war & battlefield & wasteland images.
I’m SAD and ANGRY. about the waste of my life and my life’s energy. It could have been a good life: creative, meaningful, fulfilling, possibly even helpful to the planet at this time. But it was trashed, broken, shredded before it had even properly got started. I find myself talking back to my friend with her god-dam “self involvement with your inner drama.” That makes me so angry. I’m self-involved in the way that anyone dealing with a debilitating chronic illness has to be self involved, taking care of myself, managing all the factors that are likely to throw me off, struggling against the undertow of depression. There is no “inner drama”, there are no characters, no story. There is only the grief, depression, anxiety, and terror that are triggered by some outside stimulus, often tiny, often unknown, and then the struggle to keep from being so overwhelmed by grief, depression, anxiety, and/or terror that I cease to function.
Feeling sad and angry. Whatever it was I opened up with Lore yesterday is still open. I spent some time in the studio cutting out images. War images, desert images, cold images, black and white images.
Took the self-portrait to Lore. We hung it in the doorway. It was perfect.
What’s not clear in the web copy is the relation of the outer – grey, war, & trauma images – with the inner – colorful pictures of women. To see it properly, we hung the outer pieces on one side of the doorway, and the inner piece on the other.
Lore Caldwell is an art therapist with an office in Littleton NH