The Menace Men

The Menace Men

Artist number 12 is about to pass the relay onto artist number 13.  I said previously that I hope to have 27 artists on board by August.  Maths has never been my strong point which is probably why nature pointed me towards the door of the arts.  Now that I have faced up to a few basic calculations, I realize that if each of the future artists were to complete their piece within two weeks, I am looking at November which makes the possibility of a show in December even more ambitious.  I shall not be deterred though.  Challenges are what life is all about.  Doing things safely may feel nice for a bit but after a while, one can smell stagnation in the air and then it's time to move forward again. 

Georgie appeared to bounce from one end of the spectrum to the other, as if she had no internal barometer for shutting down her system when things got too much or revving her up when she had been sitting in the same place for too long.  It was one of her endearing traits that she would say "yes" to almost everything.  Nothing was too big a task for her even when it clearly was.  One example that comes to mind is her job offer to head up the creative department of a prestigious bespoke stationary business in Los Angeles.  When she discovered the ad, stating the minimum requirements of a portfolio showing work from college and previous jobs, she did not allow a small issue of having never been to art college or worked in the industry before to deter her.  Instead, she stayed up all night before the interview, creating a portfolio from scratch.  She got the job.  Then the consequence would sneak up behind her a week, a month, or a year later and she would be stuck to her bed where the sheets hadn't been changed for two years and not move for days, barely finding the will to call into work with a fresh excuse for each day of doing a no show.  Georgie was fired from work a month before she died.  Tragic and probably inevitable.  Her medications were supposed to balance out these fluctuations but like many in her position, she had a disease that liked to tell her she didn't have a disease.  So days would go by where she would "forget" to take the pills.  And I won't be popular for saying this but I find it hard to judge her for this.  I saw what they did to her.  She was a creative person and this was taken away from her when she was on them.  Is there a way for a creative bipolar mind to keep the juices flowing AND be on medication I wonder? 

The image is of the most recent work made for the project.  The artist knows nothing about Georgie which makes it all the more poignant to me because I know she lived in a world of books and one could say she was certainly plagued by The Menace Men.