“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth”-Maria Rilke
If I am to talk about my art today I would have to talk about the last year and my last four paintings. I have never been one to differentiate between my real life and the one I create on canvas. I live between the two and they reverberate onto each other. So I feel compelled to tell you where it all began. I am a recovering alcoholic. Alcoholism always seeks to get us alone so that it can overtake us, and my life with my girlfriend of four years had left me alone. I responded with a relapse and she kicked me out. My physical world was ripped out from under me and I was filleted for all to see. It drove me like never before to make these four paintings the beginning of a new chapter. My art has been a medium for healing and transcendence to the true freedom of sobriety.
All four paintings carry a similar theme because they all came from the same place in the pit of my stomach. At first I focused on getting her back and it helped me to set a goal. Staying sober appeared minute compared to going on without her.
In the first painting I was obsessed with the fact that she was “Washing Me Away”. I was her color, and without me her life would lose its vibrancy and strength. Without her, I would lose my purpose.
Eventually I started getting stronger, and with my healing I had a newfound awareness of heightened senses. Painting sober for the first time I began to regain my lush vision. I began to wake each morning refreshed and thankful for this new bill of health. The second painting “Sobriety” attempts to capture my awe each morning as I pull into work as a milkman at a local dairy. With time we heal. I began to find myself again, along with a new- found confidence, reflecting a wide-eyed child of old.
The third painting, “Pecking Order", sprung from my attempt to find closure. As I began to transcend it all, I left the corpse behind. But I became aware of vultures in my life who lack that wisdom and understanding.
I was finally ready for the final painting in this series, which is titled “Where We Part”. This is where I leave her for losing faith in me. I had a time of weakness in my life that must have scared her. I see now that she isn’t strong enough for this journey so I must go on alone. I spent this past year reflecting, coping and finding myself again and it all lies in this painting. As you see, this painting is a compilation of the movement in the previous three. I’m ready for a new chapter where it is no longer about what I have done, but about whom I am and what I am going to do.
I will continue, as the poet Maria Rilke wrote, “to let each impression and each germ of feeling come to completion wholly in itself, in the dark, in the inexpressible, the unconscious, beyond the reach of ones own intelligence, and await with deep humility and patience the birth hour of a new clarity: that alone is living the artists life.”
-Ryan Guillaume October 2009