The Swank Hotel is my sister, Lucy Corin’s, new novel, published by Graywolf Press, and these paintings were conceived with her to be the cover, achieved on the 3rd try. The eponymous Swank Hotel, which is in actuality decidedly mundane and middle-of-the-road, is the site of one of 2 sister’s suicide attempt. While fictionalized, this character and her attempt, as well as a lot of madness content throughout the book (madness is a leitmotif), are based on myself and my psychiatric history. But I am an not just a tragic figure lost in the winds of illusion and pain, an impression you might get from the book, but am an artist too, have done a lot of work myself, much of which is on the subject of mental illness/otherness. That might be apparent already if you’ve gotten this far through my website.

Also pictured here is a short, illustrated written piece by me that appears about halfway through the book where I was able to have a voice. Getting this piece into the book and my artwork on the cover was my way of making things right and I had to fight for them. But I really enjoyed painting these rooms and so I continued to work on the series, with the addition of some relevant text, after the cover was completed.

My husband circulated a written piece expressing his own opinion on my discord with my sister over her book, which was prolonged and enormous, but he did not collaborate with me on it as I was hospitalized and incoherent at the time and he felt it urgent that it coincide with publication. He wrote it in response to watching what became a prolonged argument with Lucy about her heavy use of my biography and our conversations, but it is his opinion not mine and he has a much less nuanced view on justice and a more vitriolic way of going about things than I do and if I hadn’t been hospitalized I would have urged him to let me handle things myself. But I also appreciate his passion over this as coming from his love for me, although it hurt Lucy very much.

I would have made a statement of my own, somewhere, somehow, but it would not have been so virulent and would not have been as far-reaching (the New York Times for example.) It seems like for me, one of the results of my illness is that everything gets messy.

Discussing my paintings with a unifying narrative is not something I am going to try to do at this time, I did each one for a different reason. So this section is a bit all over the place for now.

These paintings are older work, small, acrylic on paper.

This series is called Documents of Documents from the Schizoaffective Spectrum. Every time I come back to this section, I see something I wish I had said differently, as my relationship to psychiatry and my own condition changes significantly and often. Schizoaffective is my diagnosis, a mental illness that is a mix of schizophrenia and bipolar. The symptoms encompass the drastic mood swings of bipolar as well as the delusions and hallucinations of schizophrenia.

I have come to believe that what I used to consider psychoses were mental metaphors, obsession with legitimately terrifying societal realities, and the repurposing of that plus personal trauma, as well as real spiritual phenomena. And that my extreme moods reflect the same stuff and the difficulties that come with managing it. In this project, I repurpose drawings I did while in extreme states and make them into paintings. For me, it's a way of reflecting upon and honoring those states of mind. And in practical terms, people pay more attention to paintings than sketches and I want people to pay attention to the content here. You can find the original source drawings in the sketchbook section. This series is ongoing.