About the Radians

(This is about the next 12 pieces of old art that will be posted to the blog.)

My wife and I moved from our home near Columbus, Ohio to a new apartment in a new city near Dayton, Ohio in December 2005. Neither of us has ever been timid or fearful, but this was quite a change. Even though we were only moving about 90 minutes away, by car, from where we had spent the first 10 years of our relationship, we were headed to a very different part of the state where we knew absolutely no one. In addition, my wife had recently completed grad school and was starting her first real post-grad school job, a very challenging position at a university. I was still in grad school, but I only had one semester left so I too was facing the pressure of a grueling practicum followed by the rather urgent need for a new job. All of this happened just as the long grey Ohio winter was settling in, and for our first few months in this new apartment, we both felt trapped, far from home, lonely and a bit lost.

I also got very sick. Very very sick. I don't want to go into too many details for personal reasons, but it was a harrowing experience. I was 36 years old and even though I had never been especially fit, athletic or health-conscious, I had also always been very lucky. I had never smoked, never been a heavy drinker, and never had any substance abuse problems. My biggest vices were probably an affinity for too much soda. All in all, I was, at least up to that point, relatively healthy, happy, and normal. Still, what happened hit me hard and I was facing some worst-case scenarios that would have been devastating.

Over the course of the illness, I began to feel as if my body were being reduced to its component parts. For the first time, I truly felt my own body working against me. I would look at myself in the mirror, at all the parts of my body, and it seemed foreign. Like some house made of meat and bone and crawling with hostile entities. It was deeply unsettling to lay in bed and stare down across the landscape of my own flesh and feel completely disconnected. These 12 Radian drawings were a very primitive response to that, and a way for me to cope with what was going on inside of me. There is also a considerable amount of self-mythologizing coupled with an unfortunate dose of self-pitying going on here, but that was all necessary at the time and I'm not ashamed.

Fortunately, after months of wondering and insecurity and physical misery and tests there was light at the end of the tunnel. Those worst-case scenarios proved to be just that, and I was very lucky to end up squarely in the middle of the best-case scenario. I held on to these Radian drawings for a long time, out of suspicion mostly, and when I finally felt like I was in the clear I burned them all.

As simple, crude, and abstract as these are, the Radian drawings are the most personal pieces of art I've ever created. I wasn't sure if there would be a place for them on this blog, or on my web site, but they are such a part of my own personal history that it didn't make any sense to not include them. So now you know.

Oh, and by the way, I realize that Radians doesn't mean what I thought it meant back then. The name simply stuck, and it has always felt just right even though the meaning is more personal than accurate.