I was recently invited to participate in an invitational art show at Seattle's A/NT Gallery. The theme of the show is 'PAIN' and, in the words of the gallery:
"Pain is a shared by all humanity, but everyone experiences pain very differently. For some, their daily lives involve the management of chronic pain. For others, their pain is emotional: anxiety, depression, addiction. Pain is subjective, so we've invited professional artists to create works about the subject of pain, as they've experienced. This will be a very personal and enlightening show, featuring the works of over 30 local and international artists.
I came up with the following humorous poster for the show, titled "The Illustrated Guide to Nerve Pain"
"Pain is a shared by all humanity, but everyone experiences pain very differently. For some, their daily lives involve the management of chronic pain. For others, their pain is emotional: anxiety, depression, addiction. Pain is subjective, so we've invited professional artists to create works about the subject of pain, as they've experienced. This will be a very personal and enlightening show, featuring the works of over 30 local and international artists.
I came up with the following humorous poster for the show, titled "The Illustrated Guide to Nerve Pain"
The spirit of the show is to express the artist's personal experience of pain. As I thought of what I might do for the show, my mind instantly went back to the time I had an episode of Shingles a few years ago.
For those who don't know what Shingles is, Shingles is when you catch Chicken Pox as a kid, and even though you think you've gotten over it, the virus doesn't go away - it just finds a place to hide inside one of your nerves. Years later, just when you think you are a well-adjusted adult coping with the stresses of a modern existence, the virus decides to re-activate itself, giving you a localized chicken-pox-like rash. But in the process of giving you the rash, the virus breaks out of it's resident nerve, damaging the nerve and causing intense nerve pain. And since this resulting pain is directly within the nerve itself, there is very little that can be done to diminish it while it is happening (very little, except get a shot of morphine or two, which they will maybe give you in ER, but that's another story...). All you can do is hope that the damaged nerves heal back to normal, but that takes time...
Thankfully my damaged nerve (the ophthalmic branch of the Trigeminal nerve on my forehead) healed normally over the course of the next few months, but not before it kept randomly firing with all kinds of wild, weird, intense sensations of pain, some of which would have me literally rolling on the floor. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain was often a 10. Due to related light-sensitivity in my eye, I spent much of this recovery time sitting in a closed dark room with only my sketchbook to keep me company. Every time I would have a new sensation of pain or experience, I would doodle it into my sketchbook, thinking that maybe someday, in the spirit of an engrossing memoir, I would be able to look back fondly at the experience and turn it into an autobiographical comic (working title: 'The Shingle Diaries'!).
This then here is the sketchbook page where I kept a log of all the different types of intense nerve pain I experienced:
For those who don't know what Shingles is, Shingles is when you catch Chicken Pox as a kid, and even though you think you've gotten over it, the virus doesn't go away - it just finds a place to hide inside one of your nerves. Years later, just when you think you are a well-adjusted adult coping with the stresses of a modern existence, the virus decides to re-activate itself, giving you a localized chicken-pox-like rash. But in the process of giving you the rash, the virus breaks out of it's resident nerve, damaging the nerve and causing intense nerve pain. And since this resulting pain is directly within the nerve itself, there is very little that can be done to diminish it while it is happening (very little, except get a shot of morphine or two, which they will maybe give you in ER, but that's another story...). All you can do is hope that the damaged nerves heal back to normal, but that takes time...
Thankfully my damaged nerve (the ophthalmic branch of the Trigeminal nerve on my forehead) healed normally over the course of the next few months, but not before it kept randomly firing with all kinds of wild, weird, intense sensations of pain, some of which would have me literally rolling on the floor. On a scale of 1 to 10, the pain was often a 10. Due to related light-sensitivity in my eye, I spent much of this recovery time sitting in a closed dark room with only my sketchbook to keep me company. Every time I would have a new sensation of pain or experience, I would doodle it into my sketchbook, thinking that maybe someday, in the spirit of an engrossing memoir, I would be able to look back fondly at the experience and turn it into an autobiographical comic (working title: 'The Shingle Diaries'!).
This then here is the sketchbook page where I kept a log of all the different types of intense nerve pain I experienced:
So now, several years later, I can look back at my pain episode and turn it into a humorous poster. I don't know if anyone else will be able to identify with this poster, but if you suffer from nerve pain, and some of what I describe feels familiar, I would love to hear about it. And if this poster can help you communicate your pain to others, I would feel grateful to have helped in that little way...
Here I am, finally able to smile at my personal experience of nerve pain...
[[ And as a closing note, if you have experienced Chicken Pox as a kid, I highly recommend getting a Shingles Shot when you are past your mid-forties. The statistic is that 3 out of 5 people who have had Chicken Pox will get Shingles as adults. And trust me, you do not want to get Shingles if you can avoid it! ]]
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