Product Description

Enduring tragedy and Surviving. Many of us can empathize with this. We have either done it or help someone else through it. Surviving any traumatic event changes us. We are different than we were before it happened and will be different from that moment on. 

This painting is the embodiment of elation and resurrection.
The return of my creativity rising up with new energy.  

My body coming back and feeling like blazing fire. The drugs used to treat the disease, which caused so much depression and sickness and transformed by vibrancy of spirit and creativity into a near dormant, slumbering bear, had done its job and incinerated the disease. The Phoenix rises with my spirit.

 A new man! A Spiritual being experiencing the human condition, now reunited with light, energy and new wings with which to fly.

The Deeper Dive

Symbolic of new life, regeneration, and raising anew from the ashes. This painting represents my resurrection from the broken body my own had become to the now healed one. A period of time where all I could paint were egg shaped humanoids curled in the fetal position. That’s how I spent a lot of my time while enduring the treatments for hepatitis C. My body injected with the drugs to kill the disease, before the disease killed or blinded me or I died as a result of the disease not being treated.

“That’s my broken shell, the shadow figure at the base of the painting. It could be anybody. It could represent anything, but in this particular instance, it is my mentally and physically exhausted shell. “

During two series of treatments I experienced lethargy, nausea, anemia, severe depression, and partial blindness. Two months into the first series of treatments, I started losing my vision. Large purple silver blobs appeared floating directly in front of me or so it seemed. 

The was the result of a rare side effect reaction to the drugs, which caused ruptures in my eye and splinter hemorrhages on my optic nerve. The doctors had no idea if this was temporary or permanent damage, so the treatments were stopped while I still had some vision intact. Luckily, the Universe granted me vision again as the spots in my vision faded and my eyesight returned.

12 months passed and I was informed my liver enzymes were off the charts and I had to return to the treatments. The very same drugs that caused me to lose most of my eyesight were what I had to go back and use again.

I had to self inject into my leg every week. I would inject at night before bedtime to sleep off the initial shock. The first few days were the worst for me with lethargy, nausea, vertigo and severe depression. On the fourth day the side effects would ease and by DAY 6 I would be feeling pretty good (comparatively speaking). On the seventh day I would inject again and the cycle would start all over. The only thing that kept me going was knowing that this drug was helping me and so I pushed on through the side effects. Just do it. Endure. You will survive. That which does not kill you, only makes you stronger. That’s what I had to believe. That’s what I did.

Six months into my second series of treatments, my purple silver spots returned in my vision with a vengeance. The treatments were supposed to last a full year, but it was beginning to look like I wouldn’t make it another month. I did hold on through the seventh month before the doctors and I decided to call this treatment done. I was all but blind by this point and we all kept our fingers crossed that my vision would return again.

Maybe it wouldn’t. Many people have suffered more and lost more then their vision. Living with the line, “this can be done.” As long as I would be free of liver cancer, I could live a long life without my eyesight. I had even started to develop a method of painting without seating. After all, I have a very good and clear Minds eye vision of what things used to look like and things that I dream. I can still paint, without using my eyes. Luckily, not only did my vision return, but my liver enzymes were and still are at an all time low and there’s no sign of the hepatitis C virus in my system. Hooray! This painting embodies that excitement and elation that I experienced when my eyesight came back and I was told that I no longer had hepatitis C in my system.

Product Attributes

Creation Date: Circa 2003
Size: 48” x 48”
Color: Fire Colors!
Materials: Acrylic based paints on canvas