The
later parts of the nineties were undoubtedly the most difficult years
of my life. After loosing interest in playing the game of art career,
becoming despondent about the administrative qualities of teaching art
and personal issues in my home life, I elected to recluse into my studio.
In and of itself, going to the studio is a good thing for any artist,
but locking the door on the way in to everyone or anything else entering
behind you is certainly suspect to ones state of mental health. While
I was productive throughout these years, my work was obsessive and I lacked
the perspective to see that I was becoming ill and sinking into what seemed
like an abyss of depression. Initially motivated by not caring about having
exhibitions or concerned of what others might have thought of me, I used
these otherwise admirable characteristics to shelter myself, not so much
from the world of art, but from dealing with issues which demanded my
attention and from which I wanted to flee.
Depression is a strange and pernicious monster which sneaks up on you
- if you're not careful or do not have others who care enough about you
to see the signs and warn you, it will slowly consume your identity until
one day you're no longer recognizable, even to yourself. What a great
height healing seems from the pit of despair, but it's there and if you
have access to the resources, healing is not an unattainable for anyone.
For me I went to my doctor in 1999 and informed him that I seemed to be
engulfed in a cloud which would and had not dissipated for sometime. Through
medicine, I was able to lift that cloud and see the issues and through
the care of psychological counselling, in particular my analyst Sally
Cozens, I was able to deal with the issues and slowly work my way back
to a healthy perspective of my situation. The
road to healing is not an easy sojourn but it's a worthwhile one, as with
all things which have merit they're worth working for.
Nevertheless,
the issues discussed in my art during these times are meritorious enough
that I feel I could even say they may well be the most provocative works
I have ever made. Not so much because they are somehow paradigm shifting
examples of the avant-garde but because they were simply motivated by
a desire to take as much time as I needed to say the things I so wanted
to scream to the world. With no deadlines or outside pressures these works
speak from my heart and each of these major pieces are true labours of
love.
While
the paintings took me so very long to do, each of them literally scraped
with the head of a pin, I came to realize through them that though I am
a part of society as an artist, while I might see the ill's of that same
society my ability to perceive those social tribulations does not make
them my own. "I
am the mirror and not the reflection!"
The
paintings begin with my anthropology of the morass of our 'get ahead society
at any cost' society, crawling over each others back to get to the proverbial
top. For what? There's no summit experience in reaching those goals alone.
Yet we motivate ourselves with facile platitudes such as "It's lonely
at the top". If it's so dam lonely, who wants to be there! As a mountain
/ rock climber, I had learned that very few of us get to the top without
support. Life and success are not much different. I for example know that
if I have achieved anything in this life, it is because I am standing
on the backs of others to gain that height. Be it my God, wife, parents,
children, friends and professional colleagues: they are all standing there
holding me up, a foundation. So I painted "Sisyphus'
Descendants (click for a 64 kb. Flash Movie)"
to convey the irony of the Greek myth of a man so filled with conceit
that his punishment was to roll a rock to the mountain top and watch it
roll down only to be forced to roll it up again in perpetuity.
From
there I went on to paint "Phaethon's
Faux Pas", based on the vain glorious attempt of Helios son
to ride his fathers 'chariot of the sun' across the sky, meeting only
his own demise when his naiveté caused his death. Full of images
of my own fall this painting is my own moribund plea for help and a depiction
of the hell in which I found myself in. The decade ends with a groping
to find meaning to all this despair and what I consider to possibly be
my most sincere bodies of works was born in "The
Saints". We, all of us, are not special, yet each of us,
like the saints, has not only the capacity but the potential of being
a saint. Heroes unlike saints require another economy of gifts but reaching
the status of saints requires only an astute understanding of the human
condition and then acting on it.
The drawings, while darker than the above works, convey my despair in
the process of painting those works and taken on their own are indeed
very sinister. But they do not exist in a vacuum and are in fact informed
by the paintings.
The beauty of these works from the late nineties is that while they act
as a 'chronicle of despair' they convey several important points: pain
has meaning and love can prevail through it to illuminate joy.
Since
this time I have had some years pass and in hindsight while I never wish
to be in that place of dark foreboding solitude again I did learn from
it. As an artist it motivated me to return to New York and through the
love of my friends and family I learned that as an artist it is better
for me to reach for joy, as pain always has a way of biting me in the
ass anyway. This is not said with a dark sardonic cynicism but rather
with hope, the same expectation which motivates my work today. We must
reach for joy in the same way that it is better to light one candle than
to sit and complain in the dark.
Gerard
Pas - May 2002
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