Oh, insomnia. How I loathe you. For as long as I can remember I've always had trouble sleeping. Every time it happens, I always feel like the only one awake in the world, or like the last woman on earth. Until recently, I used to have to get up around 2am or so after lying in bed for hours to paint (since my studio is also my bedroom, for the last 18 years). So it shouldn't be surprising I'd choose to paint my inability to sleep, just to exorcise that demon from inside me.
Unravel ©2001, acrylic on canvasboard 16"x20"
This one, "Unravel" is the first. It was finished in 2001 but was a memory of a horrible night in 1999. Seen from above (if you were floating by my ceiling) it's me in the bed I still sleep in, crying. I'd just heard "Unravel"by Bjork on my stereo (with headphones, in reality) - the source of the green light. The words were sad but simple, like the music. The hard part for me was the funereal sounding organ at the end. It was heartbreaking. When you're in bed at night with no hope of sleep your brain will imagine the worst things...and the song only made me think of death, and the deaths of those I loved so much, leaving me more alone than I felt even then. So, the title of the painting is named after the song, repeating in my head, over and over.
Sleeping Pills Don't Work ©2006 acrylic on canvasboard 20"x24"
Six years after painting Unravel, nothing had changed! No surprise to me, really, but looking back on how sleepless I've been since I was in high school (and I'm 40 now), how have I survived? Holy crap. Well, same subject, different view. If you were part of the wall beside my bed (in the same scene from above in "Unravel") this is what you'd see. Me, sitting up in bed, my little mini-stereo on and shining green light in the gloom, my blue windows in the background. "Sleeping Pills Don't Work." The clock on the stereo says 3:35 (am), but the 5 is backward...just to demonstrate how slightly otherworldly and fundamentally wrong everything feels during a night when you can't sleep until sometime shortly after 4 in the morning. It's terrible and lonesome. Almost dreamlike, due to the sleepiness that (paradoxically) won't let you sleep. And neither will sleeping pills.
Summer Insomnia. Typical. ©2007 acrylic on canvasboard 16"x20"
Another year, another insomnia painting. Monochrome this time. "Summer Insomnia. Typical." Same bedroom scene as the previous two paintings, different perspective, head-on. Summer is when my sleeplessness is at its worst. Sometimes it's the heat, or the sun going down too late in the evening. It's probably a self-fulfilling prophecy by now. In the darkness I can only ever see one bluish-black color, since my old mini-stereo is gone now. So, no green light in this one.
These three paintings were not hard work, and it shows (to me). The further down from "Unravel" you get, the less the paintings seem to hold themselves together...from the backwards "5" to the slanted walls of the last painting. By this time, I had no more patience with insomnia and its absolute-aloneness. The paintings themselves were not art for art's sake at this point and more like continued exorcism that just got more frantic and impatient as time went on. I don't have as bad a problem with insomnia as I did before...my doctors have been able to drug me enough so that I've ben sleeping pretty well (sort of) since 2013. Still, that's a long time. A lifetime of restlessness, slowly and finally giving in to sleep.
