After five years of making dark quilts about suicide, isolation, sexual assault, and depression, I’m trying to find a happy design I can live with.
I model for the art department and I always pay attention to the critiques because I learn so much from them. One critique was for an assignment to use gray scale for a still life. That got me thinking. We ordinarily think of dark, smaller objects farther away, and lighter, larger objects closer. But what if that were reversed?
I sat down with my sketch book and tried to find something that appealed to me. I like this idea, but I don’t like this sketch. If I changed the shapes into people…..that could be an interesting social commentary.
Usually, the larger objects are in front to show they are closer, but what happens if I put the larger objects in the back? I like this idea as well. I don’t like the sketch.
Right idea, wrong shapes.
Still not right. I’m going to have to give this a rest for a while. Maybe I’m just not ready to leave darkness.
Meanwhile….the cactus are blooming.
The clumps are maybe 10 feet apart, but the colors are different.
I’m not sure when this happened. Used to be, my quilts were pictorial. Now, they are emotional. Apparently, I haven’t been in a happy emotional place in more than four years. During those years, my quilts were about suicide, frustration with neurologists who refused to listen to me, isolation, depression and sexual assault.
Fury.
It’s hard to get everything in one photo. The quilt says: If you touch this without my permission, I will break your fucking arm.
Suicide.
Depression.
Isolation.
Mass shooting.
My quilts went from having beads, buttons, couched fancy threads to unadorned, stark quilts. The one exception is the quilt I made for human physiology.
Lots of beads and lots of whimsy on that quilt. The quilt is about my biology journey starting as an undergrad in 1977 and continuing during the last fall semester.
One happy quilt didn’t stave off a massive, all-encompassing depressive episode that left me so desperate, I considered electric shock treatments which I know are barbaric. During the last three years, my writing has become increasingly depressing. I write about suicide. I write impassioned pieces, which will never be shared while I’m alive, that are an attempt to calm the emotional roiling inside me. I write about the frustrations of having a mental illness in a world that still stigmatizes mental illness – an attitude that should have been dumped at the end of the Dark Ages.
Dark subjects started appearing in my work in 2007. I was going through hell at work – a hell caused by a lunatic supervisor who kept trying to force me to quit. Around that time, I started making dark ceramic art. Bowls with words written on them: I’m a nice person, why don’t they like me? If I stay small and quiet, maybe they won’t hit me. A ceramics classmate looked at the bowls, said they were pretty. Then she looked at what was written on the bowls. And walked away.
Self-portrait ceramic sculpture entitled: Fuck You, I’m Still Alive. Complete with bullet holes.
I tell people that art is a snapshot of a tiny piece of the artist at the time the art was created. Depression, isolation and suicide don’t seem to be tiny pieces of me. I knew that depression was a constant emotion while I was growing up. I didn’t realize, because I chose not to look, how overwhelming depression is now.
I tell people that I frequently don’t understand what I’m feeling until the feelings come out of my hands. When are those feelings going to be happy again? Or were those feelings never happy?
I’ve been working on the depression quilt. I’ve quilted the middle, but haven’t decided how to quilt the border. I thought about meandering, but I want something different from the middle. I want to show depression surrounded by no depression. I want something more open, but I haven’t figured out what. I designed this quilt while I was having an all-encompassing depression that would not go away.
My grandmother always had very little money. She sewed her clothes because when she was growing up, home sewing was far more economical than buying ready to wear. My grandmother was good at spelling and won every spelling bee. For one spelling bee, the prize was a length of pink gingham fabric. My grandmother took the fabric home. She spread out newspaper and drafted a pattern. She made a dress from the gingham, and entered the dress in the Erie County Fair. She won first prize – $3. At the time, that was a week’s wages for a woman.
She never threw away leftover fabric. Instead, she rolled the leftovers into a fat roll and tied the roll shut with a scrap of fabric. Ribbon was precious, and she never used a ribbon for fabric rolls. She used to save the cardboard that trim was wrapped around. The cardboard was used as a template for quilt pieces.
We’ve had rain in the desert and there’s enough humidity to trigger desert sage blooms. I played around with aperture. I did a bit with my macro lens as well.
No idea what I was trying to get here, but I like the effect.
I think there’s a drop of nectar at the end of the pistol.
I may try to design fabric with this one.
This isn’t an easy bush to photograph. If I get back far enough to shoot the entire bush, there’s an ugly background. If I use my macro lens, it’s hard to have a subject. The flowers are in bunches and, short of plucking a flower, there’s no way to get a single flower.
In other earth-shattering news…… I had an odd feeling that I needed to check the credit card statement. I check the statements before I pay the bill, but I rarely check the charges in the middle of the billing cycle. Turns out someone has been using my credit card to pay for meals, Starbucks, Lyft and who knows what else for the last month. Jim called the bank, our card was immediately cancelled, and they will send us new cards. Eventually. First, we were told that it would take 8-10 business days to get the cards. We objected to that and the cards, which we haven’t gotten, have been expedited. Meanwhile, Consumer Cellular billed my credit card for the regular monthly bill. I’ve been paying Consumer Cellular like this for about 2 years. Because this is a recurring charge, the bank allowed the charge.
I would dearly love to sit down with this thief after I’ve been off my meds for about a week. Bipolar disorder does come in handy from time to time.
To avoid having this misery happen again, I’m looking into VPN. There are several apps, and I’ve no idea how to tell what I need. Actually, I know what I need. I need to have a 12-year-old kid on retainer to help me with these technical things.
I’ve been manipulating photos and designing fabric.
First, start with a photo. This is part of the mat outside the sliding glass door.
Next, play around.
The editing program I use is PhotoScape X. Much of the program is free. For a one-time payment of $40, the entire program is unlocked.
Once I’m finished playing with the photo, I upload to Spoonflower and play around until I get a design that repeats in a pleasing way. I have to proof my designs before I can sell them, and I’m about ready to have another 42 designs proofed. After that, the designs go into my Spoonflower shop here: https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/deb_thuman
Does anyone really know who they are? I certainly don’t. I am forever a woman. I am forever an attorney. I am forever a wife. I am forever an artist. I am forever a writer.
I never get to be all those things at once. It’s as if my life were pieces of a broken mirror. Each piece is both the whole and a part of the whole.
All of those pieces. None ever changes. None ever leaves.
Floating above all the broken bits of mirror is bipolar disorder. I am forever mentally ill. I can medicate my illness, but I will never be free of moods that have a mind of their own.
That’s the difference between me and the people who think they know what being mentally ill is like. I live with mental illness that will never go away. I will die being bipolar. I may die because of being bipolar. People who have bipolar disorder have a suicide rate 20 times that of the rest of the population.
I wonder. What precipitates the deepening depression that takes me down and down until I must fight the thought that were I dead, I’d never again have to deal with bipolar disorder crap. Sometimes, I’m lucky. The depression takes me down below suicidal. It’s safe there. I’d have to feel better to kill myself.
But what precipitates the depression? Is it a brain chemical composition that bypasses the need to survive and sends me soaring into mania or plunging into depression? Or is it the crap I endure at the mouths of those who both fear mental illness and have no clue what living with a mental illness is like. The subtle pulling away when I disclose being bipolar. The not at all subtle backing away when I disclose being bipolar. The people who exert a tremendous amount of energy in a futile attempt to shove me back into the mental illness closet. Don’t talk. Don’t disclose. Don’t upset my world with your brain. The jackass who told me he admires how I accept no shame for being bipolar.
Damn fucking straight I don’t accept shame.
The only difference between a mental illness and a broken leg is the location of the pain.
The jackass’s stupidity belongs to the jackass. Fear belongs to the ignorant. Shame belongs to the jackass. Shame belongs to everyone who doesn’t fight to kill the stigma of mental illness.
Shame doesn’t belong to me. Shame has never belonged to me. Shame will never belong to me.
You can be part of the problem. You can be part of the solution.
To be part of the solution, listen to me. See me. Accept me when I’m in med hell with a med that no longer works for me. Accept me when I’m going through the three-month long withdrawal that always comes after discontinuing an antidepressant that no longer works for me. Accept me when I’m going through the three-month long adjustment to a new med. Accept me when I’m soaring. Accept me when I’m plunging.
Being part of the problem is easy. Being part of the solution is hard.
Deb's Art 