Chagal4's Blog

In the back end of the seventies I  was in a state of lament…Years of acid and weed and various pharmaceuticals hadn’t so much scrambled me as left me fatigued. The amplitude of the global bullshit was still trying to come down from the war in Vietnam and the street fighting in the rest of the world. Everything seemed…bleached. AIDS was killing people, wrecking families and forcing a new reality on society. Discos were blowing out eardrums, cocaine was beginning to make Medellin a household name. It was as if kids were trying to push though some invisible barrier…wild costumes and wilder hair and the punk rockers and some kind of fed up anarchy. Left, right, up, down in, out…there was no direction, or it didn’t matter. By seventy nine I was broke, depressed and living in a slum in Vancouver. I found odd jobs and paid the rent, stepped over junkies nodded out on the elevator floor and sat in my crib and read fifty cent books from the used book store. I drank sweet Marsala that knocked me out around bed time..Life was on hold. I’m sure I did some drawings and a few paintings, I remember some of them, but I don’t have any. I collected stories. Survived. With the help of my friends. Out on the edge of society there’s life of despair, adventure, laughter and occasional madness…and every night you must tell yourself…”I gotta get out of here” and mean it. My best friend came from Toronto after his life collapsed and we realized that the sixties had left us with unpaid emotional bills. It was a struggle for nearly three years…You couldn’t buy a job…and really I’d burnt a few bridges along the way. Being out of the game for a couple of years…it’s like coming out of jail…well…you just don’t. You sort of bounce along the wall until you find a door or a window…

These drawings were done in 1981. I was past the depression…I wanted clean, clear and simple images…I could see what I wanted to do with texture and colour…These are from my workbook…not for for sale but to relearn.

This entry was posted on September 12, 2015 at 4:36 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.