Exhalation

I drew this one when I was very ill.

Here

is why

if you

should like

to know...

In my head in my heart in my HEART

I have a big deformed bit of my brain. It does odd things to my world it has…
I have gone mad more times than i can countenance, than i can count.
and now -
now i have chronic neuro-pathic pain.
it has been – five years? so long?
it has continued endless and fierce and endless yes unending, and no-one of all the specialists and the thousands the tens of thousands of pages i have read and rued, no suggestion no sooth of soothing or -

ah. well.

i have had to – to stop painting, give up my artistic career. After spending 5 years not being able to paint because i was in agony, refusing to admit it and tearing myself to pieces in psychological self-savaging passionate loathing. i have learned, (i have tried i swear to it) NOT to paint unless i have what is for me a good day a wondrous day

- these appear mysteriously every month or fortnight varying from a few hours to a few hours more.

it is…

you understand.

you understand?
Do you live in this manner? In a hell. A burning bloody hell.

it… there is a terrible, inevitable mass pushing me forward in time. it is some colossal blind thing at my back, behind my eyes, aching underneath my teeth.
it is inexorable, irresistible, mindless, deadly and horrific.

it is eating my life.
and as slow as time can move for us, perhaps; a wyrm of terrible, irrevocable power nudging us forward, each breath closer to death.

but time;… in this manner, perhaps because of the invariable similitude of my tiny world and my ugly, pale and powerless life – in this manner it has accelerated beyond any conception of my imagination.

and i am… kind of CREATIVE.
this last sentence, statement, pre-ponderous exclamation,

Is a lie.

every waking moment until i was bound to this colossal searing web of pain, i made a war of shaping; the black iron of an implacable choice i chose never to stop never though i was so afraid.
I chose. i lived to make for 12 years.
In that time so many many times have i been hospitalised in mental wards. the longest months of all perhaps spent shock treatments in 2004.
in that hardness… i cannot remember it has been wiped from me the electricity took 14 months from my memory, but then in extremis in a different hell i painted and drew for at least 10 hours every day. Months in that place. Such work…
i have painted… written…
– in a living carnivale a freak show extremity.
mad. beautiful. charming.
bleeding.
(helping others so hard as they took from me, and stripped my life from me the fuckers the empty craven would that i could hate i would hate oh to hate.)
but i had so much MORE such life racing through me boiling with choice, more yes than anyone everyone else! (I lie to myself in the fantasy of my past so sweet to me now.)
The despair that worsened every year and tried to kill me and took my hands away from me and used them to cut my throat.
even in the coal-black abyss of despair…. i fucking WORKED. i NEVER STOPPED.
i do not remember but in the hospital when i was getting the shock treatment (ECT, or so the acronym falls), my beautiful friend Kirsty told me that the dressing I wore over the vicious tear in my neck was

covered

in

paint

i… don’t know i don’t know but i believe in my soul of unlikely souls that this is so.
i KNOW that it was less than 24 hours after bleeding out on my bathroom floor that i FORCED myself to pick my paints and shape the worlds.
in my head in my heart in my HEART IN MY HEART!!!
The physical pain. I – right now i cannot think love hope – my skin boils licked by such fire such heat a cauldron a pyre an inferno

and you must see I know you must because you have lived so long writhing in the darkness bolted, manacled to the vile trap that is your body.
You understand… are you like me?
That you are so much. after the thief of time and life plundered your world and flayed you like me our skins hung together across the world our fleshless agony, the agony oh each of ours only forever ours as a sentence writ unique to torture one such as you. One such as i.
The flames… the burning you must see I know you do I have hurt my fingers on these keys spelling this but it is this it is true it is horror it will not end it will NOT end

You must see… I can never, ever put the fire out! .

my hands are seared cauterised stumps my mouth solid bone.

When I am – as I pleasantly transcribe it to my family – SORE. I paint

I paint badly.

Ugly things. Oh.
And it is this that bleeds me white. The time hurtling through my invisible wounds. A cripple… I have always been crippled, yes, and a freak such a freak but this is tragedy it is abhorrent it is so

It is so sad.
It breaks my heart.

I weep for myself as I have not never done in madness.

Forgive me. It is a horrific palsied parody of living and for once for right now I pity myself for the hope that I held and for the fool I was and for the terror of pain that flays me in scalding flickering sheaves of blades.

Today I woke at 6. I was surprised and pleased to blink without my eyelids hurting me, and walk without my bare heals flaring white with illusory heat at each step.

In a frenzy, I poured out my chalk and ignored the tremor in my hands and I drew two new pastels. Beautiful, lachrymose, melancholy, tender.
Then. In my stupidity.
Fucking hell.

By two this afternoon I was hardly able to walk; hunched over masked in a snarl of useless denial.
AGAIN.
I was free of pain this morning. I made two beautiful things.
This afternoon I was in pain, and I continued to work on them. And I took the breath from them. I murdered them. So quickly were they gone from me, my hands were crooked and I would not stop I could not stop I have spent my LIFE finding the courage to face the fears that hobble the dreams of men. I summon wild angry will in the vertigo of risk, in the breaking terror of MAKING.

That. I… was. Able to. It is years now.
I couldn’t stop until I had ruined what I had made.
Ugly, nothing, ashes. Refuse.

I won’t grieve for them. No, wait, I catch your hand as you go. I have to tell you because you know. Because we must share. though our pain is forever only our own. Our stories our broken lives casting shadows sharpened by the very company we keep.

I grip your hand as you step towards the door. I can see the pain in the way you hold your spine so straight, a shuddering quiver explicates the taught muscles beneath your skin. Your eyes are desperate.
You need to escape. But only and ever after to uselessly lick at your wounds and only and forever to suffer alone so alone so very broken.
For a moment I hold the fair skin of your hand. There is a chant, almost a harmony. Pain. A whispered, vicious song. Cursing us. A touch hurts you. Hurts me.

You hesitate. Though it makes you want to scream with rage, you wince at the touch and for a moment a flash of distortion wrecks your features as you react to the flicker of agony from my touch.

And
I do grieve for them. Just pictures.
But my pictures.
My pictures make people cry sometimes. Strangers see themselves. Some kind of sweet, sweet echo.
I have seen so many, many faces wet with tears at my work.
A shard of making in the world is torn free and squats hideous and crumpled, jammed down amidst the other garbage where it belongs.

I am not crying. I’m… No.
It is hot, even for other people who live lives, here in this house. I desperately need to get up and switch off the fan that blows gently across my wrists. it tears them and tears them and burns them and hurts and hurts.

There.
I turned it off. Immediately I am wet with sweat. My meds… and the heat… and the salt of the tears.
Oh. Ow. Let me go.
Oh. I can… a tear or a droplet of sweat or a mixture toxic and sad splashes amidst the stains on my cheap shirt. Fucking useless so sad here alone I am so fucking lame.
Oh well. What the hell.

I hope so much for you that you heal.

I hope so much for me that I heal.

I want to see the world. I am so sick of this sink. Of the dirty sheets that I can so rarely find the courage to change – such movement gathers the pain to me. I am so sick of being sick I am sick of being still I am so sick of BEING I have such
So much
So taught with need and power and darkness that -

Wish with me and I will wish for you. I close my fingers as the alarm goes off on my phone to take meds that slip inside my wounds and close them not. I squeeze my hands and it hurts, and I try and imagine your warm flesh real enough to burn and hurt my stupid fucking skin.

Ah. I hope that you do read this.

I hope that it does move you.
I think that you are beautiful.
I am a little in love with you right now. Perhaps that is loneliness.
I am so tired. So tired all the time.
My heart is over-full. I need to covet and fold the terrible things inside me, hold them to me, love them and breathe softly into their blackness into their curving arc of etiolated spine. I need to be able to spill them and make them real and beautiful, make them make them let me make oh let me just a little an hour a few moments a curling truth wrapped in lines.

I wish… I wish… for you… for me.
Oh.

Oh.

I have not posted my works. There are no new works.
(written six years ago. it is not... as hard right now. i met my wife. and love oh love heals scratch by scratch and sob by fucking sob. Kitty married me and helps me and I am not alone. It is more than I could have begun to hope)

I am Paul and I paint and write, draw and play and sing.
People even pay me. Mostly for the painting and drawing part

My work is about passion.
Never believe that you do not know what it is that you see when you look at artwork.
Emerson said “Trust thyself, every heart vibrates to that iron string.” If it moves you. If you can feel it, if you see yourself in its shadows or a memory or a hope, a colour, a place a feeling – if you empathize… if it makes your breath catch in your throat. That's the only thing that really matters.
That – THAT exquisite moment is such a gift to me. It is the greatest hope that I carry with me in my hopeful little heart of hopefulness.
It is a great honour to be in any way a part of such feelings with my work.

PAUL'S ART CAREER:

I was invited to exhibit at the Soho Gallery In Soho Village New York, but my health did not allow me to take advantage of that opportunity. I have a certificate of art and design and a bachelor’s degree in fine arts, majoring in painting, for which I maintained a distinction average.
In 2000 I exhibited at the Como Library, which led to an exhibit at the Como Gallery. I also sold work during that year through a variety of commercial galleries including the Schubert Gallery on the Gold Coast.
I had my next solo exhibition at Gallery 274 in Northbridge in 2001, followed immediately by another solo exhibition at the Babylon Hotel. That year Cannington had three consecutive on-site art competitions coinciding with markets, painting timed in situ. I won all three awards, including one sponsored by the then premier, Geoff Gallup. I won the Katanning art award and the Wongan Hills Art Award.
In 2003 I had a highly publicised solo exhibition at the Hawthorn Gallery, which the Premier of Western Australia opened. The Premier and I had planned a portrait sitting, but he retired due to personal reasons and I missed that opportunity. . I won the Mosman Park Art Award that year.
In 2004 I held another solo exhibition at the Australian Institute of Management, and that Institution also purchased a four meter tetraptych which still hangs in their foyer.
In 2005, I held a solo exhibition at Little Creatures Brewery in Fremantle and another at the Mosman Park Town Hall.
In 2006, I held an exhibition at a central Florist in Floreat and was fortunate enough to have a sellout show.
In 2007 I exhibited at the Matisse Restaurant at City Beach.
I won the international art award - the Royal Australian and New Zealand College of Psychiatrists (RANZCP) that same year.
In 2008 I held a solo show at the Moores Building in Fremantle.
I became ill with CNS pain and spent 8 years bedbound, during which time I wrote a 5000 page novel “All That We Have Given” – one chapter of which subsequently won a place in the Atlantis international writing Award, along with another short story.
I was invited to exhibit at the Soho Gallery In Soho Village New York, but my health did not allow me to take advantage of that opportunity.
I won the Armadale Writing Award in 2018. I wrote a another novel for LGBTQ+ tweens but have not pursued publishing due to my health.
My health has slowly been improving in the last eight years, but I am not interested in exhibiting presently.
I have sold work to to collectors in many states of Australia, the United States, Europe, Asia (including Japan), and I exhibited on the South Bank in London in 2023 despite being too ill to attend the exhibition.
I am severely disabled. I was born with a left temporal lobe sub-arachnoid cyst and have no function in more than one fifth of my brain. This has resulted childhood epilepsy, prosopagnosia (face blindness) rather extreme ADHD, mild dyspraxia, the above mentioned CNS pain and bipolar one disorder. The bipolar required annual hospitalisations until 2014, and I have undergone ECT (shock treatment) over many years. It has impacted my memory. I don’t have any recollection of winning more awards, but my family assures me that I have won more. Unfortunately most would have been awarded before such things were published online. I am unsure of the total and lost the physical plaques for the awards during the haze of my illness, which has lasted for eighteen years. However, I am functional a few days a week and often attend life drawing – I have sold dozens of fast life drawings to the models themselves, which is, I gather, quite unusual. My bipolar is now far more manageable and I no longer requite ECT.
Presently I am engaged in illustrating a graphic novel that I have written.
It concerns the darkest of subjects, but because I’m an Aussie, the dialogue is hilarious because THAT’S HOW WE DEAL WITH ADVERSITY. It’s a tradition I’m proud to carry on.
I am half way through the illustration of the graphic novel. I am painting or drawing each panel to the best of my ability and it is some of my most powerful work.
My ambition is to create one of the most beautiful books in the world.
Sometimes I paint in public, and every now and then people will cry when they see my work.
I hold that to be the greatest honour an artist can receive.