Doodling on the wall.
Painter's tape and Emulsion paint
By mid 2007 my second marriage was all but over. I had been in the hospital for four days and my eyes began to see the world in a unique way that maybe only anti-depressant drugs can shape. I knew then what I had needed to do and then set about doing it. Over the next few months I would go through a metamorphosis of sorts finally becoming what I had not been for quite sometime…happy. Not truly happy mind you, for I don’t think anyone can really attain this goal, but I guess I no longer had “things hanging over my head”. Of course as I left one box of crushed in reality, I would enter another box all together.
I would move from having three but one and not two, to having three but two and not one. I could not win it would seem. My reality and perspective “things” started bending back and forth between what was and what would now be. For those that I had regained there would be those that I would lose. That was my reality. In an attempt to win this thing…this “thing” of reshaped realities, I began to reshape and re-twist my perspectives on things. An attempt if you will to be able to recreate and maintain at virtually the same time within the safety of a self imposed box.
Therein lay my quandary for it was this self same box of enclosure that I sort to escape. But age brings reason and solace and acceptance, and by my 41st birthday I would be determined to discard as I moved forward within reason as far as my spirit could take me. Then it happened I started doodling…“again”. I doodled the same thing over and over and over for months. Little boxes strung together with a “non- deliberateness” for some and deliberation for others. All with twisted forced perspectives and skewed views. Then the boxes became connected via a series of three bent lines telling the viewer whether to go left or go right. Over and over and over and over and over And over and over and over again. I thought nothing of it and obviously looking at them from within my head and not without. I think during this time I may have even doodled a dog in one of them for a friend that was a friend but is no longer a friend. Another friend collected them all and gave them back to me one day only to have me dash them away for being nonsensical doodles that meant nothing and weren’t real. I regret this now. When I needed them, I couldn’t find them.
Then one day I felt like doodling on my wall at home and going really big, as Louise Kimme had said to me some years back in Tobago. This first piece AHZKEWED PERSPECTIVEZ is the beginning of what I hope will turn out to be a seminal work that will, for me at least) carry me on a journey of rekindlement of the soul, and through many various artistic and design related disciplines. As my friend Dave says: “Well boy, yuh know a box is a thing like that eh…”
Richard M. Rawlins December 28th 2008. NYC.
