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Suffering and Human Cost

Suffering and Human Cost was a title that I came up with when i was at my sickest and most vunerable I have ever been with my crohns disease and HS disease. Something I have suffered with from the time I was a kid. For 2 years From June twelfth it progresed in ways that I never even imagined was possible. My lower half of my body had become a wasteland of skin tunnels, boils abscesses and so much body fluids it was a nightmare. With this I was unable to go for walks with my partner and daughter, unable to walk for longer then 10 minutes, and my energy was fleeting most days where it left me bedridden for most of the months. I realized in this time that I had taken alot in life for granted without realizing it. I had suffered before but never to the extent of having even my ability to sit taken away. I was living in a nightmare where everyday I geniuenly thought it would be my last. With having a daughter that was only one to two at the time all I could think about was how she was going to not have her funny goofy father around for her life and how she was going to be robbed of that special connection of even knowing me a little bit. May came like spring flowers and I was given a bit of hope when my GI doctor had brought up how she thinks its time for me to see a surgeon and surgery was now the only option. After MRIs, countless scans and cameras where you dont want them, I was told I had complex fistulas that dug into my pelvis region, Ulcers, polyps that spanned all the way through my large intestine and colon. This left them with the idea of what they call an illeostomy surgery. Basically a loop of the end of my small intestine that comes out of my abdomen. This new obstacle in itself was frightning but in that suffering that was to come and new hurdle, I had a very big new sense of hope. my only option at a chance to have my life back. In that month leading up to it was the worst time of my life. My health rapidly declined to the point where every night even with the antibiotics it was a feeling of weakness and sick i could barely fathom. All of this suffering put me mentally in a dark place for a long time, that i was scared to share with anyone. countless days laying on a uncomfortable couch in a basement where the walls seemed like they were getting tighter and tighter around me. So many days where I just thought to myself how id be better gone than wasting away where my partner wouldnt have to take care of me. Its a monster I wrestled with in my mind every day. Forcing a smile to the world in hopes this new hard edged mentality wouldnt shine through and the dark creature that sat on my shoulders also hopefully would stay inside and not win. My daughter and partner were these angel like figures and rays of bright light and hope for me well going through these dark thoughts of suicide and hatred for the world and what i was going through for so long. Finally June 12th came. This was for me a turning point in my life. I went in for surgery near the evening. It was a 3-4 hour surgery they had said and i was to be put under for it. Before the surgey I remember being wheeled into what seemed like a cold room where the only colors in this basement like dungeon was a light teel color that mimicked the color of a fresca can and what seemed like the most off putting white. It was silent. So silent i felt like maybe this is what hell was. In tremendous pain, about to face a terrifying surgery that i had no idea if it was going to fix me or leave me with more problems ontop of the ones i already have, or even worse since i was already a skeleton shell of a human being, death. could my body handle this final bout of wrestling with a demon ive been at war with the my whole life. I got rolled into a room where there was unfamiliar faces who i was suppose to trust my life with now. They ensured me everything was to be fine and ran me through everything that was about to happen. At this point i wrestled with a faith that there was something else beyond what life was being a spiritual person as it is. 2 years of suffering the way I did my mind was always at a war with myself that there was even anything anymore to begin with. Countless conversations in my mind and outloud cursing whatever this was and why the universe did this to me. Then I fell asleep from the sedatives. When I awoke the room was dimly lit, I was in excrutiating pain. A lady shoved an oxygen mask to my face as I watched my vital signs keep dropping on the machine infront of me to my right. She kept asking questions that I dont really recall other then when she asked me if my pain was severe as I was groaning if I remember correctly as I was in tremendous amounts of pain. I heard my surgeon behind me to my left walk in and say she thinks I need to go back into the surgery room. So she let me know they were taking me back in. At this point anything to get me out of what felt like the most confusing painful point in time and a trip itself. So i fell asleep again. I woke up at around eleven thirty from what I can recall to my partner rubbing my forehead and telling me what happened. The reason for all that pain after surgery my intestines had wrapped around themselves after my surgery and I started to loose blood flow to them. After this I was in the hospital recovering for 2 weeks. Countless syringes of dilaudid, hydros, and morphine. So id take my music take the dilaudid and slip into a trance like state where the dreams were vivid and reality and dreamstate slipped into one. It was bliss. After the first week they started to tone everything down and started me on the hydromorphone. this was when everything seemed to get very real. The nights were annoying and long. I was trying my best to eat and get my insides moving but they just didnt want to. Eventually gas and fluids were passing through my stoma ( the part of my intestine that is sutured out of my body) and this was when I started to feel like maybe things were going to be alright. At week two I got discharged. Slowly I walked out of the hospital and into the sunlight for the first time in what felt like forever. Grabbing the handle hanging off the roof of the car and going to swiftly step into the car my leg gave out and i almost fell out of suv I have. This was when I realized I was going to have alot of work to do to get better. At week three I hit another roadblock. I ended up back in emergency cause I was having a blockage. Staying in the hospital for another 3 days well I went for another mri and waited for things to clear up. I ended up home. At this time I started working on the series when arriving home. I knew I needed to take advantage of being able to sit for longer then ten minutes. Mind you it was only thirty minutes i could do but it felt like the longest extra twenty minutes of life opposed to not being able to before the surgey. Taking this for granted was something i could not do. So I took the book I had found thrifting and that was photographs of world war two and started to get to work. I started with making propadanda type posters through photoshop with using a brutalist theme. After that I spent a week staining all of them through various techniques. Once I had finished staining the posters, I ended up tearing them the way I wanted them. the bases of the canvases I used dang primes and then also used a texturing method with a ivory black and ultramarine blue. Once it was done setting id slowly build up the collages one by one. Step by step slowly building it up. This first series for Suffering and Human Cost I wanted to take a look into one of the brutal points in history that suffering and human cost was a prominent thing at global scale which is why I chose WW2 to introduce this series. Below will be the canvases, their titles, and a brief discription about each one of them.

Chaos and Outbreak
(18 x 24)

With this piece i wanted to explore the chaos and outbreak of emotions that were present in the beginning of the war. Families in panic and wondering what was going to happen regardless of where you were located. Disorder and panic swept the nations like a plague with everyone in state of disarray.

The Clash
(24 x 48)

This piece specifically is titled "the clash" its number 2 out of the series and explores the time when action was very prominent. Around the world bodies were piling up and it was kill or be killed. There wasn't a time to even think about what you had done. It was destruction, Ferocity, hostility and Inhumanity all hitting a peak regardless of location and which side you were on. This state of deep seated ill will with active opposition created intense relentless and powerful feelings. Which ultimately leads to extreme cruelty and lack of compassion.

Brotherhood for Cash

(24 x 24)

This piece explores the Conscription and brotherhood portrayed to young men during the era of ww2. With propaganda pushed towards them to be heroes with friends, many signed up under age or as newly young men to fight a war with friends. With boots on the ground, they quickly realized they were deceived into a false reality of brotherhood. The process for creating these pieces was a fun time. for creating the photo images i had found a old ww2 photo book and upcycled it. scanning all the pages into my computer. then i created brutalist inspired propaganda posters to use for it. i spent about a week experimenting staining the paper from methods I've used and already done through the years of being very big into collages.

Cost of Bereavement
(12 x 36)
When making this piece I was wanting to explore the grief that came with war. Families losing loved ones and nver seeing them again was a feeling many faced back then. A type of suffering we have all faced as death is something in life no one can avoid. It leaves you with uncertainty and a state of loss with many emotions coming afterward. Anguish, bereavement, and hardship were the topics I explored for this piece specifically.

Aftermath
(18 x 24)

With this piece im targeting the end of ww2. Stagnation, malaise and fragility were my target topics for this one. At the end of it all every nation left fragile. In the wake of this fragile like a domino effect it left the people in a state of malaise. Uneasy feelings of is it really going to end.

Wasteland of Ruin
(12 x 16)

This is piece 6 of the series. I wanted to make this the smallest piece of the series because of how little everything. Devastation, desolation, and erosion. That's what I was exploring with the final piece. With the canvas I chose being so small to show how little the lives affected seemed to mean to those in charge and made orders. The cost being so big the canvas being so small. The only thing being left was devastation. Landscapes that once flourished with life and color left desolate, and what once was a society now eroded.

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