'Shape of Madness' by Cierra G. Rowe

 

This painting is a kind of study. — Though I would argue that madness itself can't actually be studied. I think that it is within human capacity to assume that everything can be studied, with the intention of claiming a breakthrough of some sort. Anyone can claim to be an expert in any or all things under the sun. In the age of digital output, anyone can type a few words on a screen and claim knowledge from a computer's programmed chain of answers. Anyone can order a book, read a few pages or highlight text and claim expertise. But until you become your topic of study, your pseudoknowledge and faux expertise is, on many levels, nil (atleast where madness is concerned). To truly know madness is to be mad; something that no sane person would ever want. Something that escapes the glamour glow of being romantic and eludes the surface lore crafted by bored humans. A person may study ''madness'' from an academic standpoint. Books containing case studies and psychiatric research will lend only so many answers. But the true nature of madness will linger out of touch. Unless of course the ''student'' is mad. But I assume that few would admit to such a thing. — Nevertheless this is my study through painting and partial writing. Again, one could say that even with my efforts, madness cannot be contained by mere alphabets or tidy sentences. What lingers beyond words and acts as its own explanation? I would say painting. I'm biased because I'm a painter but I feel that a visual has a special ability to speak deeper to the senses. Precisely because it lingers beyond the clutch of words, I also feel that madness can certainly be captured through brushstrokes. To paint about it, one must know what it is to have felt its penetrating and merciless shaking of all, rearranging that which was into something that reflects that which is no longer. There is nothing wrong with being sheltered, unless and until you begin speaking foolish assumptions centered around topics that are foreign to you. Few things are worse, where it concerns conversation, than a person speaking only to be heard and offering nothing but repeated words - none of which are their own. Within this painting, a figure appears to cry. Not out of defeat or depression but out of emotional lassitude. Colors push against black, feeding a void that wasn't there before. Incoherence narrates accumulation, as soft tears act as threads of sanity, falling deeper into the other side of the spectrum and turning into something else. The affliction grows contagious. While not alone in the midst of chaos, it remains as its own force. There is a painting behind this painting because I painted it that way. If one looks closely there are hints of what was; forms, colors and trees all obscured now, by the shape of madness.