Sample Concepts
For The Art Gallery To Preview Before The Show
Just to give a quick idea of what I’m planning to do for the art show, there will be descriptions and titles next to each piece and they will all tie into the full concept.
The show is called “Unlikely Heroes: Jaime and Max Relive the Future, Past, and Present With Valentines From Robots & Devils.”
Here are just a few of the pieces I have picked so far, with descriptions to go with them, starting with art representing Jaime and Max, my inner children who have been out lately since I have been dealing with Dissociative Identity Disorder and they are a big part of the concept of this show, which is about learning to play again and to believe in magic.
This painting was the very first one I did in the last hospital I was at, where I did almost a hundred drawings and paintings in my time there. This is one of my favorites because I think it is a great representation of Jaime, the 4-year-old Autistic inner child who painted it. He is part angel and part devil. He’s very kind and smart and articulate but is quick to lose his temper when under a lot of stress and many things stress him out because he is both sensory sensitive and sensory seeking and at that point in his journey, when I did the painting, I was detoxing from alcohol, a comfort to him since he was a baby. It was given to him to help calm his tantrums and he was not ready to give it up when the addiction came back right before that, as a way of coping with his recent trauma.
Jaime is very smart and creative and he loves all sorts of happy Muppets. He carries around a stuffed Kermit. He loves his children’s books, dressing up in costumes and doing fashion shows, swimming, riding waves, collecting rocks and other nature, finger painting, molding clay, Winnie the Pooh, Charlie Brown, Avatar the Last Airbender, Rainbow Brite, Strawberry Shortcake, Care Bears, Owl House, The Neverending Story, Mac and Me, Batteries Not Included, The Secret Of Nimh, The Iron Giant, Spirited Away, Rugrats, the Red Sox, Smurfs, blocks, patterns, stickers, dinosaurs, skateboards, sidewalk chalk, bath toys, English muffin-pizza, mozzarella sticks, Annie’s mac and cheese, quesadillas, mint chocolate chip ice cream with butterscotch and whipped cream, Shirley Temple drinks, apple cider, seahorses, rainbows, picking flowers, Pixar movies, Bubble Bobble, Tony Hawk games, and he is non-binary. He likes hugs sometimes, when he feels the person giving them is safe but usually he prefers space and alone time. He likes to dance and nap too. His favorite music is early 70s folk-rock and 80s pop. He is very loving and gentle and loves being treated with kindness and open-minded understanding but if he is treated unfairly or even witnesses unfairness towards others, he can get very upset.
Max was like a little brother and soul mate to me who I lost to suicide soon after his 18th birthday, about 20 years ago. He was half-black, bisexual, and into witchcraft, an artist, and a Juggalo. Little Max, my inner child, is about 7 years old and is some of these things, as well as some things I am, like he is Autistic too, but he is better at masking and he is intersex, like me, but more of a typical masculine boy than Jaime…He likes martial arts, swords, basketball, drums, bass, rap, DJing, hip hop, punk, graffiti, graphic novels, comic books, skateboards, Tony Hawk Games, the game “Bully,” Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Goonies, Stand By Me, Stranger Things, Black Panther, Karate Kid, Kill Bill 1 & 2, Garbage Pail Kids, Batman, Terminator, Jurassic Park, Harry Potter, Garfield, MTV, King Of The Hill, Home Movies, South Park, Jay and Silent Bob, smoking weed, Smartfood popcorn, Cheetos, nachos, chicken wings, fruit punch, orange soda, grape drink, peanut butter crackers, candy bars, beef jerky, backyard adventures and walks in the woods, water guns, throwing rocks into the water, splashing, boxing, digging, cars, motorcycles, boats, space ships, Adidas, toads, being messy, bowling, playing pool, hackeysack, gluing things together, magnets, tattoos, loud music, comedy, and whatever hits his spirit in the moment. Sometimes he does things that he is too old for and sometimes he does things he is too young for. He is a traumatized orphan though, who takes care of himself, and he does what he wants. He carries a TMNT backpack, drum sticks, and Animal Muppet and he is very brave and loves his little brother Jaime and tries to protect him. Jaime tries to protect Max back.
This was, chronologically, the first of these pieces that I created, back in October of 2023, right before I celebrated my first Samhain. An ex-therapist whom I had just dumped, after he turned out to be an unhealthy match for me, had suggested I paint a map of my dream world when I told him that I go to the same alternate reality every night in my dreams and that I had a night terror of a bombing but I couldn’t figure out where in my dream world it was located. He was in the military and seemed to know things about me that he wouldn’t have gotten from my regular psych charts and he had made negative assumptions about me based on limited information and untrue rumors. In some ways, at first, I thought I was getting something out of his very different approach to therapy where he had me reading all sorts of triggering books and wanted me to take cold showers every morning, meditate for at least ten minutes every day, and force myself out of the house and out of my comfort zone. Some of that was helpful but most of it was not and he wasn’t very understanding about it when I didn’t do what he wanted me to do. He had a “man-up” attitude and accused me of being all kinds of things I’m not. I felt, after doing this painting and moving on from him, that he had targeted me and tried to trigger me and push all of my buttons. This painting, however, was just kind of a fun representation of my dream world and I didn’t do it until after we had stopped working together. It’s not an accurate map, if such a thing could even be made, but even then, in October of 2023, when I had not been hospitalized since October of 2011, I had dreams, every night, that I lived in a psych hospital. That hospital is in the top center of the painting for that reason. It’s supposed to be my home on the hill. Other things represented in the picture include the island I swam to in 2010, the Godfather’s house, a fancy Italian restaurant, an underworld with naked people, an amusement park, P-Town, a record store, a baseball park, the projects, a sky ride, a spaceship with my dead cat Moo in it, giant birds, and a Harvard dorm where I sometimes squat while homeless (in my weird, reoccurring dreams, that is).
Although I painted this in October of 2023, soon after starting back up with a good therapist who I loved, this painting became symbolic again in late March of 2024, a couple of weeks after I returned from the first 5 traumatic hospitalizations I recently went through and was hoping to get back to work with my awesome therapist again, but found out I was losing her. I felt certain that I was being watched at that time (and I still think I was) and I was giving information to whoever might be watching….I didn’t and still don’t really know who or how but both the right and the wrong people were watching, causing some sort of chaos in the universe that I think was ultimately for the good of the world but I used this painting to try to imply where I thought the explosion came from in my dream, and I was saying it was on the dream version of the island I swam to in 2010, pictured in the top right of the painting. I think that’s where they light the fireworks around here for Town Day and it’s basically right where the Patriots Day Parade ends. I was making reference to my true story of the three times I swam to that island during my spiritual journey in 2010 and how I thought my dad had a satellite following me around. The story of those swims to the island are some of the best metaphorical chapters of my first book, “The Godchild: My So Called Delusions,” and this journey I have been on is all just more to that unusual story. My next Godchild book, “The Godchild 4,” like this art show, will be about Jaime and Max, my inner children, and how the true Godchild within me could only be born once I let the child part out and began to believe in magic again, which I now do.
This photo was taken when I got out of my 7 hospitalizations. I was very dissociated and couldn’t wait to play with my toys again. As soon as I set this one up, I got the chills, realizing that I was piecing together some kind of important memory or familiar idea. I also got an idea to try to do a painting inspired by it, which I did a couple of weeks later. This photo includes some of my toys… a VW Bus, ET in drag, a Moon Man MTV Award, my internet box, and a dragon from Game of Thrones. My grandfather had a big van when I was growing up and I have used the toy van to represent him in spiritual rituals. ET was the first movie I ever saw in the theater. I went with my dad when I was four. Now my dad controls my internet and reminds me of an alien somehow. I also got my mom into Game Of Thrones and what happened with Daenerys on the show severely triggered me and reminded me of my mother in a way. These things all relate to the story in the picture somehow.
I did this painting on the front lawn of the respite group home I was staying at for a few weeks. It was inspired by the photo I took of my toys. I painted the VW bus with what I envisioned to be an alien showing a movie through the moon and projecting it onto the universe to tell the star’s story. There is a mini Ouija board glued to a star in the sky and fire spreading around the bus, signaling danger. A cat-bat creature, rather than a dragon, is standing on guard in front of the bus. A large fighter plane is flying overhead because in some ways, both versions of this scene depict a memory of watching planes fly by near the airport with my father and grandfather as a child. The respite I painted it at was also near an air force base that’s not too far from where I live and those airplanes have triggered me a lot this past year because they started flying far more often when I was sending emails to my therapist about some of the significant trauma I’ve been through and things I know that have put me in danger. It seemed like the planes were flying directly after I wrote certain top-secret type of things. I felt like I was in a war zone and worried that I might be attacked. It really bugged me out to think that leaders all over the world, fighting in WWIII, (whether we call it that or not) were reading my emails and hanging on my every word. I don’t even know if there is any truth to it now and if there was, I also don’t know if what I was saying made any sense or if there was anything to any of that either but it went on for months and it certainly at least felt connected. The planes weren’t bothering me too much at the respite, but they were huge and low to the ground there. It was the same thing at the last hospital I was in, when we were out in the yard with huge planes flying over us because it wasn’t too far from the airport there either.
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I think there is something significant about the night my father and grandfather took me to see the planes near the airport as a child, just like I think there was something significant about the time they took me to the top of the tower in P-Town. Were these significant things traumatic memories or just significant because they were spent with family? Right now, I really don’t know what’s unraveling in my brain. I become fearful of what I might remember but while all sorts of new memories have come flooding back recently, none of it has really been traumatic for me. Some of it has opened my mind to questioning whether certain traumatic events I’ve begun to picture ever actually happened at all, however, or if I’m completely losing my mind. This art in “Scene 1” kind of depicts me feeling like I’m the sun, the very misunderstood star of the solar system who has an extremely strong soul and is the light in the yin and yang. In my vision, an alien turned me human and is keeping me captive, as an orphan child, on that bus, where something is going on. Is it good? Bad? Both? The alien is using the star of the solar system to project its story into the universe and that is where it all begins and ends. However, if the story keeps going, eternally, the realities keep spinning and the world remains in motion. All we have to do is hit the rewind button and start again.
This painting is supposed to represent a confusing memory of a trip to the Pilgrim Monument tower in P-Town when I was 4 years old, possibly on Halloween, when my father and grandfather took me up to the top, early one morning, and told me that I was a princess and that was my castle. At that point, I still thought of myself as a boy and didn’t want to be a princess. I peed myself on the way home later that day, for the first time, which left me full of shame. I have since begun to wonder if that memory took place on Halloween, which was a day I know something very traumatic happened to me when I was 4 years old and I have begun to wonder, due to other memories, if my intersex operation was actually not done at birth, and whether something happened that day on that trip to the tower that traumatized me. Some of my memories are clear and some of them don’t make a lot of sense and this painting is where I think a few different memories are bleeding together as the truth starts to unravel and appear and my brain remembers new things I forgot.
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I will have writing to go with each piece and there will be paintings, drawings and photos, plus spoken word poetry, a rap song, art talks, and a playlist of songs on a theme that goes with the concept of the show. I will also try to provide some fun snacks that will be good for our inner children like popcorn, animal crackers, cookies, candy, berries, etc. I don’t know exactly what yet, but I’ll find some fun stuff and I am hoping to maybe even provide a couple of live musicians.
Some of the other pieces I want to show include these shown below, and I have a collection of about 35 pieces, between paintings, drawings, and photos…
I have pretty much all of the others picked out too. I might not frame all of the photos and may bring a folder full of photos to show at the event instead of trying to frame them all, but I do want to include some in the show.
This will not be the song order, but my playlist will include the following songs…
connected — stereo MCs
hippie chick — soho
sippy cup — melanie martinez
crazy — seal
misunderstood- common
things can only get better — howard jones
why go — pearl jam
the boxer — simon & garfunkle
gloria — patti smith
warrior — matisyahu
the pusher — hoyt axton
highwayman — highwaymen
gone insane — ab-soul
lemme find out — perceptionists
this is me — reks
apple tree — erykah badu
young forever — jay z
the whole world — outkast
the healing — gary clark jr.
patticake — self
And that is just a little more info on what to expect from my early fall concept art show.
