Little Drummer Boy

I started episodes of depression right about 1992, and, man, they were terrible. I would find myself walking through the house crying and I didn’t know why. I’d look at the window and say to myself, “Just dive through it, like Superman, and you won’t cry no more.” All I could think about was suicide. I was walking one day all over Atlanta. I ended up on an expressway bridge and decided to jump. A man standing across the street yelled at me, “Hey, you don’t want to do that.” Well, that kind of woke me up, interrupted my trance, and I went over to Georgia Baptist Hospital and found a doctor, a cardiologist named Dr. Lipman. Eventually I ended up with Dr. Ball, a lady psychiatrist. I got sent over to a psycho ward across the street for depression. “Talk Therapy.” I got to Dr. Ball and told her to get me out of there. They were starting me in “sessions,”like a first grade child, talking and playing and drawing. I drew something like a stream running over a rock and forming a waterfall. The lady said, “Yeah, you need to keep doing that. It’s good therapy for you. See all that red? It means you’re hurting.”

When I was discharged I walked home and picked up some little black dolls behind an old building, took them home and made that "Little Drummer Boy" piece. After that I kept walking and finding stuff and making tilings out of it. I had considered making things before, but there never was any time for it. I was glad to try to let my head relax and come up with different ideas. I knew that my depression, if I allowed it to, could take complete control. I thought I knew how to control it, by making paintings that got the feeling out of me, mostly explosive, mostly angry. Most of my first paintings were about depression. Or about the concentration camp. After I visited it I should have been able to leave those thoughts behind. I had been a nurse, had seen suffering and death, but those thoughts of that massacre never left me. They stay with you. You just want to put a bomb in your head and blow those thoughts out.

I appreciate balance, and when I'm making things or arranging things, I believe everything must be in harmony with each other. Even in abstract art, that may be confusing to other people, it got to be a conglomeration that balances out. The big round painting I look at from my bed, it is supposed to represent the feeling of a person's soul, it does its duty to bring in balance the experiences of that person who is looking at it. There's a poem I had to learn back in about the fifth grade in LaGrange, Georgia, and part of that poem said

All are architects of fate,
Working in these walls of time.
Some with massive deeds of great,
And some with ornaments of rhyme.

That poet, he addresses my everyday life, he makes me know that I am important. I fit into the category—an architect of my own walls, with my own rhymes. Art is my own rhythm.