The Devil's Diaries: The Voice Within

Going back wasn’t an option. God knew I wished I could, because a new kind of despair—one I didn’t recognize—set in when I found myself painting again for the first time since my breakup. Over the past several years painting had become for me the artistic equivalent of cutting. In theory I loved the textures, the smells, the colors in those little tubes of oils and acrylics...yet in practice the urge to create always turned into a nightmare. What started out as a pretty flower in a vase would somehow wind up sharp and jagged, in oranges and reds and yellows almost too harsh to look at. I just could not control my brush. Daubing would give way to a manic series of movements as my hands worked independently of my brain, as if an ugly, wounded creature inside of me was urgently trying to communicate a plea for peace that never came.

Yet that plea could not be ignored. Whenever I felt the need to paint, I couldn’t sleep, eat, anything, until I obeyed the monster within. After the session ended and my brain had slowed again I would feel exhausted and ashamed, confused with what had overcome me. But I refused to give in. One day I would paint something beautiful.

Until that moment came, I had to suffer through endless rounds with my dubious muse. The stories she told never had faces, only shapes and movements and hues that failed to match anything I saw in my own mind. After three weeks of this, a whole scene, sprawling across three large canvases, began to open up before me. I’d meant to create the sensation of standing in the field of wildflowers I so often visited in my dreams, but something had gone terribly awry. It was a field, yes, and certainly full of flowers...yet instead of serenity, the meadow before me took on a curious sense of foreboding. No matter how hard I tried to make the meadow pretty, the sense of dread only deepened.

It started driving me mad, to the point where I was spending all of my free time in front of those three canvases. I forgot to eat, my sleep suffered, and I actually had to force myself to work on the four seasons book I’d promised to illustrate for a favorite author. Even as I stood in the shower after a particularly rough illustrating session, my thoughts were consumed by how to fix that painting. In my bedroom alcove I threw on some old clothes and pattered back to the meadow. Something had to give before I lost my mind.