The Intruder Series and The Suicide Portraits

This drawing, "The Intruder" is one of a series of drawings that I did during a very dark period of my life.

My wife and I were living in Vancouver, Washington. We had moved in order to buy a house, but neither of us realized how much difference it would make, moving just across the river.

My wife needed the car for work and I felt stuck in that ugly, toothless city. You can't even get a good cup of coffee over there and it seems like the only dog allowed in Vancouver is the pit bull. I remember the flat blocks and run down houses surrounded by chain link fences and the Cash Connection on the corner. Everything had a cheap dollar store feel to it.

I saw less and less of my wife and she would often come home crying. I asked her what was going on and she said it was just some sort of mid-life crisis. She was in her early thirties, so I took her word for it--after all I had went through my own life-transitions.

She began to drift away from me and I could feel it, but I didn't know what to do. We had once been so close we called ourselves "soul-mates" and we were the envy of our friends and family.

I turned to drawing and painting. The drawing above, the one with the dark silhouette and fly, is one of the first of the Intruder Series. It felt as if I was an unwilling psychic--I saw a series of images in my mind's eye: my wife and I in bed while leering men looked in at us through the bedroom window; our house on fire and a gorilla breaking through the front door; strange men standing on the front lawn of our house with the impassive, thoughtless faces of zombies, and the blow-fly buzzing around and crawling over everything.

I didn't know what it all meant because the images were coming from the damp-deep-down in the well of my psyche and not from my conscious mind. The images were disturbing and I didn't always draw them. I didn't want to see.

I didn't see much of her in those days and so I often drew her back or drew her sleeping beside me. I was trying to hold on to her--I realize that now. The drawing to the right is one of my drawings of her as she rushed off to who knows where. I think the caption written on the drawing says it well--"Always on the go."

When the housing market crashed we lost the house in Vancouver and moved back to Portland. Not long after that I discovered the truth of what was going on, and finally, reluctantly I left her and our two cats and headed for Eugene, Oregon.

When I first got to Eugene I was living in the basement of a friends house and whenever the dark fingers of suicide reached out for my throat I turned to drawing. I did a series of nearly 50 self portraits that I call The Suicide Portraits. I was looking for myself in the dark and my pen was the flashlight.

Now I am going back to school to earn myself a Fine Arts Degree but I will never forget how the ugly truth surfaced in my artwork like a bloated corpse rising to the surface of a swamp and how I drew my way through the dark tunnel of suicide by finding my face in the dark.

To the right is one of the Suicide Portraits.