Brian, oh how we miss you. We will forever.
He was OB or Obie, his whole life, O'Brian in high school, and Brian often as an adult. Many more nicknames followed him through his short time with us.
Below Brian loved math. The nodes of his Thought Diagram were ideas and concepts. The segments in between suggested how he envisioned their connections.
 |
As a collaborative art project for an upcoming 2019 exhibit 'The Art of Healing,' Brian and I decided to add his Thought Diagram to my original artwork, below.
Below I created this scene when he first became ill. He is the figure in the bottom left. I was imagining the terrain of his newly imposed world... utterly lonely, mystical, terribly frightening, unusual, and beautiful all at once.
We believed that by adding Brian's Thought Diagram to the landscape, we'd create a collaborative and meaningful enhancement.
Below Shows the same image after I added Brian's Thought Diagram. Our intention was for Brian to annotate and augment the ideas in the Thought Diagram by writing in the starry sky, with white ink, his ideas and thinking behind the diagram and his impressions of his own brain network differences.
Below Brian's response to my inclusion of his diagram in my original work. The diagram had now become a representation of his schizophrenia.
Below The last image Brian sent me before we lost him. It's the homepage of a new blog he started to provide a safe online arena where others with mental illness (brain network differences) could write freely about their struggles and successes.
Brian named the site practicallyinsane.club. Sadly, there's an imaginary email address universe@noonecares. He has changed his own figure in a frightening way, but he added a warm glow in this rendering that was not present before, and that I interpret as somehow hopeful. Perhaps there is hope in an ending.
Below This poem Brian wrote in his sophomore year in high school (although junior or senior year are ascribed erroneously below.) His writing is prescient. We believe neither he, nor friends or family, knew the import of what he wrote at the time. It seems only too clear now.
Below This print I finished shortly after Brian's death in January, 2019. He is the white crane. The red crane represents the rest of us.
