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HEAVEN OVER THE OCEAN
SUNRISE OVER MONUMENT VALLEY
WEST MAUI MOUNTAINS
This painting represents God looking down from heaven with sadness and compassion for all the pain and suffering in the world. It represents God’s desire for us to repair, heal, and transform the world and to correct injustice. In Judaism the concept of humanity’s shared responsibility to heal the world is called Tikkun Olam. This concept is a fundamental moral principal in modern Judaism.
This painting has many layers of meaning and symbolism, inspired by my father who painted while he was completely blind.
The tears represent sadness (mine and my fathers), and also represent my dad's pride & joy for inspiring me to create beautiful, meaningful, heartfelt therapeutic paintings, which have helped me mend my own broken heart and wounded spirit.
The beautiful orange yellow sunrise heralds a new day; a new chapter in our lives. The calm tranquil blue water in the ocean represents the vast deep intimacy Edwin and I shared together. Beginning with our submarine rides together in the pool, extending throughout our lives, water represents Edwin’s and my genuine deep mutual love and affection for each other. The tears create waves and ripples in the water which symbolize Edwin’s ongoing, reverberating impact on my life and psyche. His presence perpetually resonates in my life,
This painting was based on a real life episode when I nearly drowned in an ocean swim after being pounded by a 25 foot wave. I prayed to god to spare my life and after what seemed like an eternity my outstretched hands emerged from the dark cold water and I gasped for air. This is one of the poignant paintings and stories in the book Living with Edwin.
This painting represents the universal human experience of suffering with
emotional pain & heartbreak. We all sustain loss of loved ones, experience
grief, sadness, and pain which creates emptiness inside us and a longing to
reconnect.
We are each individually responsible for healing our own heartbreak, for
our own emotional healing. We are each capable of acquiring the tools and
skills to mend our own wounded hearts.
This painting was inspired by a frightening dream where I was plummeting into a deep abyss. I prayed to god to save my life . I immediately stopped falling. I become suspended in mid air, floating peacefully just a few feet from the ground.
The dream symbolizes surrendering my desire to control events, and to relinquish control to a higher power.
This painting symbolizes my locked up, deep emotional torment and the
fears which arose from the emotional and physical abuse during my childhood
and adolescence. I hated the abuse which I encountered and perpetually tried
to escape. I endured the abuse of my father and family, and I loved them even
though I was wounded, confused, and appalled by their behavior. This painting
represents my fears of being eternally bullied, punished, abused, tormented,
and persecuted.
The crucified tuna fish is roasting in an emotional hell, nailed to the cross,
and has a nail painfully impaled through the eye. The helpless limp tuna fish
is sad, suffering, and numb; restrained and in shock; yet is stoically surviving
and enduring the pain. The tuna’s world is literally turned upside down. The
nail through the eye represents the suffering and pain I endured due to my
father’s blindness and abuse.
The tuna symbolizes me. Tuna fish was my favorite food when I was a child.
I loved to eat tuna fish sandwiches so much that my mom Judy used to kid me
that she was going to change my middle name and call me Curtis “Tuna Fish”
Dickman.
It is paradoxical that I am nailed to a cross in the painting because I am
Jewish. The painting symbolizes my prior religious ambivalence and my
rejection of Judaism as a teenager. As a teen, I saw documentary movies of
the Holocaust which depicted the horrendous torture and murder of Jews in
European concentration camps. I was aghast and profoundly frightened by
the vivid movie images of starving Jews, mountains of Jewish corpses, mass
graves, gas chambers and crematoriums. I was hypersensitive to these images
because of my childhood abuse and my preexisting strong fears of persecution,
torture, and suffering. As I watched the movie, I felt overwhelmed with fear
and thought “If this is what the world does to Jews, then I don’t want to be a Jew
any longer”. I subsequently tried to suppress my Jewish identity and abandoned
going to synagogue. As I grew older, I still enjoyed celebrating Jewish holidays
with my parents, siblings, wife, and children, and retained an affinity for my
cultural heritage. After beginning psychotherapy and confronting my issues
later in life, I returned to synagogue with my children, and fully shared my
Jewish culture and religion with my children and family.
The nail through the eye also symbolizes the pain my father’s blindness caused him, me, and my family.
This painting represents the universal human experience of suffering with
emotional pain & heartbreak. We all sustain loss of loved ones, experience
grief, sadness, and pain which creates emptiness inside us and a longing to
reconnect.
We are each individually responsible for healing our own heartbreak, for
our own emotional healing. We are each capable of acquiring the tools and
skills to mend our own wounded hearts.
This painting represents addiction and the destructive process of selfmedicating
with alcohol or drugs. Painful feelings are difficult to process.
Addictions work temporarily to deny or avoid acknowledging painful feelings
by numbing the brain and disconnecting the awareness of emotional pain.
Self-medicating is an unproductive, unhealthy, destructive coping mechanism
which never permits effective acknowledgement or processing of the
underlying feelings. The brain is injured by chronic abuse, like having a frontal
lobotomy. Meanwhile, the melting Daliesque clock depicts time ticking away,
as the anonymous individual avoids the opportunity for emotional healing
and recovery.
This painting was inspired by my frustration and heartbreak over my
brother and sisters’ self-destructive addictions. Andrew and Dana each died
prematurely from the combined effects of drug abuse, cigarette smoking, and
compulsive eating disorders. I tried to help them but was ineffective; they
never fully embraced my attempts to intervene.
Eyes are recurrent important symbols in my artwork. They can represent
the preciousness of sight, the emotional pain of developing blindness, denial,
the inability to see or recognize certain issues; the gifts of insight, knowledge,
compassion and understanding. It also symbolizes “God’s Eye” a comforting
loving perspective from a higher power
I painted this cathartic piece while I listened to loud Led Zeppelin music.
I painted rapidly, from my “gut”, using palate knives and acrylic paints. The
painting was deeply emotional, emanating from my subconscious, unlike the
meticulously planned and laboriously executed technical paintings which I
previously painted. I was not assigned a particular topic or subject matter, but
was instructed to crank up the music loudly, spontaneously paint “from the
heart” and “see what happens”.
The results astounded me and provided plenty of material to discuss in
my therapy. My painting portrayed a dramatic episode of torture and abuse
which my parents inflicted upon me when I was a teenager. My feelings and
thoughts were screaming to be released from my subconscious, where I had
kept my painful memories of this devastating trauma locked away for decades.
I had not adequately processed my “rape”. I suffered from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD).
This painting portrays my parents violently, forcefully, cutting off my hair
when I was 14. They held me down and shaved my head completely bald,
against my protests. They raped my sense of identity and stole my innocence.
They literally and figuratively amputated my connections with my teenage
peers.
The colors and forms are symbolic. My body is depicted by my favorite color
purple. My mother Judy, depicted by her favorite color orange, is lying on top
of me; her body and her tentacle like arms are forcing me down on the ground,
restraining me, entrapping me. Judy was a conspirator and accomplice to my
rape. My bald shaven black head is painfully disconnected from my body,
suspended in space and time. My mind and body are numb, stunned by the
violent assault. I am overwhelmed by my simultaneous feelings of sadness,
helplessness, impotence, fear, loathing, anger, and contempt which were
invoked by this violation.
I am alone, isolated, and helpless; sucked into the vortex of a tornado, against
my will. The central red tornado represents my father Edwin’s dominating
power, fury, vengeance, viciousness, and destruction as he orchestrated and
enacted my rape.
The green hatchet protruding externally from my skull is partially buried
within my head. The symbols depicting my words are indecipherable. The
(Figure 14) Rape of Adolescent Innocence hatchet concretely symbolizes my baldness as my personal “Scarlet letter”;
I painted this canvas while wearing a blindfold as a tribute to my father
Edwin, for my own catharsis. My wounded heart is central in the painting; it
is painfully impaled by a corkscrew and pierced by a lightning bolt. There is
a large blood stain on the left emanating from my heart. The eye represents
my father’s literal and figurative blindness. It represents his inability to see the
impact that his emotional and physical abuse had on my heart, my feelings,
and my psyche. The dark and gold backgrounds represent my simultaneous
existence within diametrically opposed universes; my yin and yang life
realties as an adolescent; like my father’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde behavior, his
rationality and irrationality; his normalcy and pathology; his lovingness and
rage.
I painted this cathartic piece while I listened to loud Led Zeppelin music.
I painted rapidly, from my “gut”, using palate knives and acrylic paints. The
painting was deeply emotional, emanating from my subconscious, unlike the
meticulously planned and laboriously executed technical paintings which I
previously painted. I was not assigned a particular topic or subject matter, but
was instructed to crank up the music loudly, spontaneously paint “from the
heart” and “see what happens”.
The results astounded me and provided plenty of material to discuss in
my therapy. My painting portrayed a dramatic episode of torture and abuse
which my parents inflicted upon me when I was a teenager. My feelings and
thoughts were screaming to be released from my subconscious, where I had
kept my painful memories of this devastating trauma locked away for decades.
I had not adequately processed my “rape”. I suffered from post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD).
This painting portrays my parents violently, forcefully, cutting off my hair
when I was 14. They held me down and shaved my head completely bald,
against my protests. They raped my sense of identity and stole my innocence.
They literally and figuratively amputated my connections with my teenage
peers.
The colors and forms are symbolic. My body is depicted by my favorite color
purple. My mother Judy, depicted by her favorite color orange, is lying on top
of me; her body and her tentacle like arms are forcing me down on the ground,
restraining me, entrapping me. Judy was a conspirator and accomplice to my
rape. My bald shaven black head is painfully disconnected from my body,
suspended in space and time. My mind and body are numb, stunned by the
violent assault. I am overwhelmed by my simultaneous feelings of sadness,
helplessness, impotence, fear, loathing, anger, and contempt which were
invoked by this violation.
I am alone, isolated, and helpless; sucked into the vortex of a tornado, against
my will. The central red tornado represents my father Edwin’s dominating
power, fury, vengeance, viciousness, and destruction as he orchestrated and
enacted my rape.
The green hatchet protruding externally from my skull is partially buried
within my head. The symbols depicting my words are indecipherable. The
(Figure 14) Rape of Adolescent Innocence hatchet concretely symbolizes my baldness as my personal “Scarlet letter”;
This painting used black and gold background colors. It represents a map
of my psyche; it contains sharply demarcated, well contained, conscious (gold
area) and unconscious worlds (black area). It also represents my external
appearance to other people, and the self which I keep hidden from view.
The golden half of the picture represents my consciousness and the external
image I project to the world. The square yellow area with the rainbow
represents my neatly packaged conscious perfectionism and my ego. This part
of my world is beautiful, luminous, bright, and colorful. The bright vivid colors
represent my success, triumphs, talents, achievements, and service to others.
Everything in this part of my life looks extraordinary and wonderful from
the outside or at the conscious level. There is beauty, competence, stability,
excellence, security, satisfaction, and happiness which is present and is visible
externally to the surrounding world.
The black half of the painting represents the coexisting dark gloomy
universe within my subconscious. It is not illuminated, is kept beneath the
shiny surface, and is hidden from the view of my consciousness and from
other people. This is a dismal part of my psychic world where anxiety, fear,
shame, and anger reside. It is repressed and inaccessible.
The square blue area is deep beneath the surface, within the darkest and
deepest recesses of my mind. It represents my basement or lock box, where
I stuff and hide my sensitive feelings and thoughts in the repressed area of
my subconscious. The Blue box with the X represents my danger zone, where
I lock up and store my demons, my ultrasensitive issues and wounds. It is
a “no man’s land” where my unacceptable feelings are imprisoned in my
maximum security “penitentiary”. The shaded blue stripes and background
colors represent different depths of the prominent feelings of sadness. The
red represents anger, pain, and frustration. The lock represents the secure
barrier to restrain these demons, so they are unable to escape. The key in the
lock represents hope and a viable, visible mechanism to release the pent up,
untamed, threatening, wild monsters from their lair.
This painting depicts the emotional processes associated with the universal
human experiences of grieving for the loss of loved ones. The four rectangular
shapes represent the discrete phases of shock and denial, anger, sadness,
acceptance, and bargaining. Each rectangular phase has its own predominant
colors which are reflective of the emotions and experiences which dominate
each stage.
The shapes and forms, however, are not all discrete or fully appreciated at
first glance. There are triangular or pyramidal shapes, upright and inverted,
which represent simultaneously experiencing different emotions, such as
denial and anger; anger and sadness; sadness, and acceptance.
There is a central path which winds through the course of grieving. A
path that is followed in the processing of the experience. The lightning bolt
represents prominent sharp stabbing emotional pain and anguish. There are
different shades of the blue colors; each shade represents a different depth and
intensity of sadness.
The eclipse of the sun and the moon represent denial, but also symbolizes
other things. The sun and the moon symbolize heavenly, divine, &/or natural
processes; things we have no control over. The eclipse also represents grief
triggering innate unconscious processes in which loss generates reactions
and feelings that we are unable to control. Grief is an automated inherited
neurological process that all humans experience. It is hard-wired into our
brains.
The permanency of this image reminds us that we never completely stop
grieving for our loved ones who have passed. We never stop missing them.
The intensity of grief and the feelings may diminish with time; however, they
never completely disappear.
Each subsequent loss cumulatively resurrects these feelings and processes.
This painting represents God looking down from heaven with sadness and compassion for all the pain and suffering in the world. It represents God’s desire for us to repair, heal, and transform the world and to correct injustice. In Judaism the concept of humanity’s shared responsibility to heal the world is called Tikkun Olam. This concept is a fundamental moral principal in modern Judaism.
This painting has many layers of meaning and symbolism, inspired by my father who painted while he was completely blind.
The tears represent sadness (mine and my fathers), and also represent my dad's pride & joy for inspiring me to create beautiful, meaningful, heartfelt therapeutic paintings, which have helped me mend my own broken heart and wounded spirit.
The beautiful orange yellow sunrise heralds a new day; a new chapter in our lives. The calm tranquil blue water in the ocean represents the vast deep intimacy Edwin and I shared together. Beginning with our submarine rides together in the pool, extending throughout our lives, water represents Edwin’s and my genuine deep mutual love and affection for each other. The tears create waves and ripples in the water which symbolize Edwin’s ongoing, reverberating impact on my life and psyche. His presence perpetually resonates in my life,
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