My journey into the arts began with several unfortunate years of extreme abuse as a child. What it gave me was the ability to notice the details in my surroundings and to feel things deeply. In my healing journey as an adult, I’ve been able to easily connect emotions to events and feel them more deeply than just the facts of the story. As an artist, this has helped me figure out how to paint emotions with a brush and compose emotions with sound.

My most recent series focuses on the thawing-out period between abuse and healing. Some of the emotions I explore are metal permafrost, a splinter of hope cutting through trauma, the dance of the lost self, rhythmic ghosts of memories past, rising in a desperate search for light, primal rage, never unscarred, finding the safetyof your own embrace, and so on. Since these emotions are so human and universal, I use mostly human forms to inspire my paintings, and I draw on emotions for my notes, chords, timing, tension, release, volume, rubato, and feeling in my musical compositions.

Below, I’ve chosen one story from many to illustrate the difference between telling a story primarily with the facts (the first four paragraphs) and telling the same story, primarily focusing on the emotions I endured during that horrible night.

They trafficked many kids, from little babies to toddlers, myself included, and forced us into situations designed to induce as much fear as possible. Why, you might ask? At the time, we had no idea why they did what they did. Some kids did not survive the many tortures forced upon us; some kids were supposed to die, and other kids, like myself, somehow survived. When one adult tortures another adult, such as during wartime, the victim can at least understand what their captor is doing and what it all means. But in the case of children, and in my case, when the adults pried open the door of the coffin that a petrified little four-year-old me was in, I saw faces laughing with delight. That’s messed up, and that messes up children. Often for life.

These clever cowards had killed an adult man, cut his body cavity open from his throat to his pelvic bone, and taken out his internal organs. Then they put this corpse into a coffin, spread his rib cage open, and forced little me into the cavity of that dead man, slammed the lid shut, hammered the nails, and lowered me into a grave-like hole they had dug into the ground. Pitch black, awful smell, fear increasing with the sound of dirt being shoveled on top of me. My little arms couldn’t push the lid open. My screams eventually stopped out of exhaustion.

Then, after a period of time that I lost track of, the door was pried open to the delight of these cowards. With anticipatory glee, they witnessed the terror and horror coursing through the mind and body of that child. The confused look, the cries that had worn down to a whimper. The blood all over his tiny, shaking body was a particular enjoyment for them, sending chills of evil delight into those horrible adults. They really loved all the blood for some sick reason. Their laughter, their dark eyes, their hypnotic, animal behavior of salivating before and during a feast. These sub-humans were enjoying a moment they had been thinking about for weeks. Planning, obsessing over, making sure everything was done in secret, in the dark, protected from prosecution, and often supported by certain officers of the law.

This was only a warm-up to an evening of ritualistic sexual insanity. You know... the traditions, the order, the robes, the circles, the sacrifices, the chanting, the blood, and of course the sexual debauchery. And they often used children and babies to pull it all off. May they all rot in hell.