My father’s repulsive and frightful criminal acts were a Mind Altering Experience. My eyes depicted the terror I felt as I witnessed crimes a 10 year old child should have never seen.

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.

Tags: childhood trauma, terror, crimes