SIMPLE ARCH
By Paul D Robertson
Charcoal and chalk
45 x 30 cms.
325.00 framed
“I have this terrible craving. It is there all the time. It never goes away.”
And she said:
“Is it for SEX!!?” (she tackles me into the bushes.)
“No, babe. No. I don’t know what it is for. It hurts. I want it to stop… wish for it. It hurts me.”
Then we had sex. Again. (She and I are still very close by the way. I have painted her many times. It is twenty years since that day.)
I wrote this in my journal that night.
The painting and the writing. The songs. They help. And they are endless. I feel compelled to paint and write. I feel sick with guilt if I do not. Yeh - compelled. It is a COMPULSION.
I can’t work in a conventional context. I have never been able to work. I am too mad and madness – well… it really, really SUCKS. I have been fired from about 20 different jobs.
Most people make monumental sacrifices to paint as much as they can. I had no choice, I guess. Nope. A blessing somewhere there after all that humiliation and failure. Almost all of the jobs were labouring. It is hard to… be fired for ineptitude from the most basic of human endeavours. After the fifteenth time it is kinda depressing.
I still don’t know what the craving is for. It is still there. But if it is not destroyed, the old wounds that it finds wear the aegis of my work… and keen as the ache remains, will always remain, I DO have that. And I AM blessed that I was born with the means to access this amelioration. More than that, yes… more… I am PROUD that I have forced these honest and often strange things into the world with my will.