Forcing the Hand
Before I learned the full extent of what happened to me with my father I drew this. While looking at myself in a reflective surface which distorted my image, I drew and painted Forcing The Hand. I used both hands at the same time.
Forcing The Hand showed many of the emotions my father and I experienced including rage and terror respectively. The amber and blue eyes depicted a wolf’s eyes. My father called himself a wolf. He hunted often and preyed on innocent children.
There's more to this than I wrote last. This work also represents the first time my father used physical abuse to keep me silent about his identity. Forcing The Hand is about my father breaking my forearm. And then he refused to get my arm casted as a punishment and also for me to remember what happened when I disclosed his name to other people. He was super secretive about his identity. I didn't understand why until this year, 2017, when I remembered that he had two professions: he was a serial killer and worked for the law enforcement in the US government.
Mind Altering Experience
While viewing myself in a distorted reflective surface, I rendered this drawing in watercolor pencils using both hands at the same time. I drew and painted this before I knew I had a different father than my stepdad, and before I knew what happened to me at age ten. Nine years later in 2010, I started to remember what my father did. The first memory of his crimes surfaced in 1989. However due to a horrible therapist those memories were buried again.
A close study of this drawing/painting revealed pencil lines above the eyes where the forehead and top of the head would be. I remembered when I decided to leave the forehead and top of the head blank. Thus I named this artwork, Mind Altering Experience.
Four and half months after I first wrote this, I figured out what I drew back in 2001. I looked into a mirror and drew my father’s face. His eyes had turned amber around the time I visited him in 1963.