Art Archive

Painting from the Psych Ward

I painted the beginning of this painting while inpatient at Aurora Las Encinas during arts and craft time. It is my first abstract piece. I was surprised to discover how creative I felt there, digging among old board games like Monopoly for collage material and working in child tempuras instead of my usual oils. I kept the piece of overworked construction paper through my stay, oddly proud of my first artistic effort in a year of multiple psychiatric hospitalizations. When I got out of the psych ward, I mod podged it to a canvas and added a border and purple feathers. I call it Inpatient, Forgive.

Art with Mental Health Detritus

I enjoy using pill bottles and Saphis casings as frames for my mixed media oil paintings. Stockpiling and creating from the detritus of my illness makes me feel as if I am doing something positive and healing. In so openly declaring my illness in visual art, owning it, I feel I am working towards destigmatization. These three paintings were created in the same series of recent work.

Call for submissions

This is a call for submissions for a proposed anthology entitled Headcase: LGBTQ Writers and Artists on Mental Health. We are particularly invested in making sure that we have a genuinely diverse array of writers and artists contributing; we want to include the voices of people of color, of youth and elders alike, of trans, gender non-conforming, and two-spirit people; people living with dis/abilities, low-income people, people whose intersectional identities are underrepresented in media.

a little something…

See if i care, flat out, see if i care, if i care about you, if i care about this or that, and I’ll lie, hold my words at bay, smile outward, pain inward, and I put my heart on my sleeve and make my legs work, one step at a time and hold my head high, and eyes locked forward.

La Tempête Parfaite

I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Brent Jones. In his first post with us, he writes a poem about emotions and self-esteem. Thanks for sharing with us, Brent!

La tempête fait rage dans mon coeur / The perfect storm rages in my heart
Quand les vagues prédestinées du destin rencontrent lentement le fond marin, l’océan dans sa grandeur n’est pas assez grand pour les contenir. / When the predestined waves of fate met the gradually shaped bottom of the sea floor, the ocean in its greatness was not big enough to contain it.

A Trans Woman’s Open Letter to Her Dad

Hi Dad,

It is time to address the last sticking point in my transition. I don’t need to remind you that I am making the single biggest step in this journey in three weeks (and yes, I’m absolutely certain). If required, I will go into greater detail, but you don’t want that and I’m not excited to have to.

“The Beast” – A comic by me

I would like to welcome the newest member of our writing team, Sydney. In her first post with us, she expresses her experiences with depression with humor. Thanks for sharing with us, Sydney!

After a long hiatus, my depression came back. I made this comic to deal with it.

Lady MacBeth

May 24th is Schizophrenia Awareness Day. In honour of it, we’ve gone purple for the day! Here’s a song, written and performed by Coda Francis, about his experience with schizophrenia.

I hear sirens in my head,
As I’m wide awake, laying on my bed.
The air is thick with the smell of fear and hate.
Clean the carpet from the hypothetical blood stains.

Brother Mine

I’m afraid you have become furniture, brother mine.

Nothing but an engraved box among a hollow wooden desk.

You’re not longer those books your read, the letters that lined

The inside of your throat and tongue. You’re no longer

The songs you played with shaking fingers and bouncing

Legs at three AM when the world finally dozed to sleep.

The Window At Night

Trigger Warning: alcoholism, addiction, mention of drug use

How many of my own garments shuffle
with the scrubs and hospital gowns
They feel disposable
But so do mine
As I prepare
As I prepare to leave the hospital
As I prepare to go to rehab
I listen to Amy Winehouse on my headphones.
She is dead.
That is enough
I say yes to everything but is it enough