Nicholas Baxter

Here’s my newest painting in The Apostasy series, in progress since early March and finally completed this week:

Transfiguration, oil on panel, 48 x 24 in, 2013

The Transhumanist agenda: Raze the wilderness, extract and exploit, leave nature gutted, concentrate populations in urban cages, destroy their mind and body sovereignty, keep them atomized, drugged, distracted and entertained, parade the false hope of technological salvation, take absolutely everything, repeat, repeat, repeat…

Here are some detail shots:

Stay tuned for another post soon with process photos spanning start to finish.

My newest completed painting originated out of the photo shoots I conducted for my 2010 series Rebuilding.  The image of extracted hook with bloody gauze rag was leftover reference from that time, a powerful symbol I had always wanted to paint but ran out of time before the exhibition was to occur at Last Rites Gallery in February of 2010.

Searching for an idea to paint before embarking on a recent trip to New Mexico, I came across this reference photo and decided the time was finally right to complete the artistic thought.  New Mexico feels like a healing place to me; its nickname “the land of enchantment” rings true in the way my mind and emotions feel whenever I visit.  Happily, it turned out to be the perfect place to manifest this painting based on an ancient Tibetan teaching related to emotional and spiritual healing (especially having the good fortune of working on it while staying in my dream home!).

One of my favorite writers Pema Chodron has studied this teaching extensively, offering a very clear modern interpretation:

The usual translation of the word shenpa is attachment. If you were to look it up in a Tibetan dictionary, you would find that the definition was attachment. But the word “attachment” absolutely doesn’t get at what it is. Dzigar Kongtrul said not to use that translation because it’s incomplete, and it doesn’t touch the magnitude of shenpa and the effect that it has on us.

If I were translating shenpa it would be very hard to find a word, but I’m going to give you a few. One word might be hooked. How we get hooked.

Here is an everyday example of shenpa. Somebody says a mean word to you and then something in you tightens— that’s the shenpa. Then it starts to spiral into low self-esteem, or blaming them, or anger at them, denigrating yourself. And maybe if you have strong addictions, you just go right for your addiction to cover over the bad feeling that arose when that person said that mean word to you. This is a mean word that gets you, hooks you. Another mean word may not affect you but we’re talking about where it touches that sore place— that’s a shenpa. Someone criticizes you—they criticize your work, they criticize your appearance, they criticize your child— and, shenpa: almost co-arising.

That’s why I think this shenpa is really such a helpful teaching. It’s the tightening, it’s the urge… it’s this drive, too. This drive. It really shows you that you have lots of addictions, that we all have addictions. There’s this background static of slight unease, or maybe fidgetiness, or restlessness, or boredom. And so, we begin to use things to try to get some kind of relief from that unease.

Something like food, or alcohol, or drugs, or sex, or working, or shopping, or whatever we do, which, perhaps in moderation would be very delightful—like eating, enjoying your food. In fact, in moderation there’s this deep appreciation of the taste, of the good fortune to have this in your life. But these things become imbued with an addictive quality because we empower them with the idea that they will bring us comfort. They will remove this unease.

We never get at the root… . The root in this case is that we have to really experience unease. We have to experience the itch. We have to experience the shenpa and then not act it out.

[Chodron, Pema. "The Shenpa Syndrome: Learning To Stay." Shambhala.org. Shambhala International, Sept. 2002. Web. 1 May 2013.]

Shenpa (Towards Healing), oil on panel, 11 x 14 in, 2013

Shenpa (Towards Healing), detail

I managed to photograph the major developmental stages, though not always in the best light while traveling.

Painting in the inspirational interior of an Earthship.

My friend Addie over at Fuck Yeah Mad Pride clued me in to a fascinating blog featuring the art of people considered to be in extreme mental states, called Art From The Edge. Having made some art in years past while in some of these natural, non drug-related “edge states” I find this blog incredibly interesting, and it should be relevant to anyone addressing issues surrounding mental health in our society, or dealing with their own mental health issues.

I can’t help but think of the recent Sandy Hook school shooting in my original home state of Connecticut, which recently brought these issues to the forefront of a national debate.  Did the perpetrator of this unnecessary tragedy have a nonviolent, creative form of self expression–such as visual art–as an outlet? Could future massacres be prevented with more awareness of edge states and the role that creating art can play in diffusing and communicating difficult emotions?

One glance through my paintings, with their intense nature, and one could easily conclude what I already know firsthand: how effective and therapeutic creating art indeed is.

 Included on the Art From The Edge blog is a beautiful explanation of its purpose and conceptual background, to which I would only do a disservice in trying to paraphrase with my own awkward writing style, so here it is:

Art from the Edge, a virtual gallery and resource center by the creators of the Serious Mental Illness blog, is a blog dedicated to art created in and about extreme mental states. It is an open and public world wide forum for artists to share their visual and written works and their personal stories with all those interested in the connection between creativity and “edge” states.

Much like art, which exists in a multitude of mediums and forms of expression, there are a plurality of “edge” states that inspire the artists who harbor them. For this reason, we leave the term completely open to our community’s interpretation, knowing from research and experience that this state could be driven by psychosis or trauma, or an altered state induced by drugs. It could be the offshoot of extreme depression or grief, or the aftermath of a spiritual or mystical state of consciousness. Ultimately, we are interested in the artist’s individual experience and in his or her sense of what it is that drove the creative act.

The link between creativity and extreme states was first discussed by Aristotle who said that “There never has been a genius without a touch of madness.” Cesare Lombroso, an Italian criminologist, was the first to give this link a public platform by assembling a large collection of psychiatric art in the 1880s. He claimed that “Genius is one of the many forms of insanity” (Seldes, 1996, p. 102). A now substantial and ever-growing body of research is empirically verifying the strong connection between mental illness and creativity (Waddell, 1997).

Post-Impressionist painter Vincent Van Gogh, the quintessential mad artist, experienced prolonged episodes of depression and possibly psychosis, spent considerable amounts of time in psychiatric facilities, and famously cut off his ear. The life and works of Van Gogh, as well as those of Sylvia Plath, Jackson Pollock, Martín Ramírez, Ludwig van Beethoven, Virginia Woolf, Ernest Hemingway, Judy Garland, Robert Schumann, a few among many, suggest that creative genius is often accompanied by extreme mental states.

Art from the Edge does not assume that all art has its roots in extreme states, nor does it champion the idea that all artists experience or have experienced extreme states. Its main purpose is to be a place for such art to be appreciated and for such artists to be heard––on their own terms.

My 2010 painting Progression Through Unlearning (oil on panel, 12 x 12in) features the symbolism of scars and tangled audio tape to represent the personal struggle to overcome internalized negative messages received during childhood.