jonathanvair
patreon
Animus Solo: Angry
🕑 Added 2019-03-22 12:00:03 +0000 UTCVent art. I normally respect the concept but do not encourage it in myself. It's about releasing pressure, buying time, keeping your head above water. Sadly, venting is never about treating symptoms. Animus Solo was about venting, about not waiting for the conclusions before jumping into the middle of my feelings. This image is about earlier last week, when I was so angry that I jumped.
August was the last time my sister and I talked. I used to be closer to her than anyone else, but she dropped all communication with me in favor of "self-care." She never felt she owed me an explanation about that pause. It was easier for her to be cute and professional on Instagram daily than tell me she even needed the space. Thinking on her cowardice made me angry.
I called my mother for her birthday (one day late, by mistake, which we laughed about). I told her I'd be driving in the area for a convention later this year. When asked, she said she wouldn't allow my partner into the house, because she doesn't support our "lifestyle", and allowing him into the home would send "mixed messages". She called my partner my "lover" to reduce our relationship to a fetish. She learned he was trans, probably on Facebook, and decided to block both of us over last Thanksgiving. After years of supporting her, even when she didn't love herself, she didn't even listen to my context. She said I knew I was going against God's will, and tried several times to debase my spiritual beliefs. She said she has no need to learn new things about gender or sexuality, her son, or Scripture. She knows everything she needs to know. I told her I can't talk to her anymore unless she treats me like a person and listens to me. And her idiocy made me angry.
The next day, my grandmother died. I didn't know what I felt when I first got the call. At my grandfather's funeral one year prior, she told me that some people could love their grandchildren the same after hearing that they weren't straight, but she wasn't one of those people. She cried when I was born and God told her I was going to be different. She never explained why "different" is worth crying about. I thought about how I didn't get to mourn because I was already dead to her for a year. And thinking of her being there for my birth and then discarding me as rubbish after 29 years made me angry.
I thought of the Church--the capital 'C' one-- that sent my friend to a concentration camp because he was queer. I remembered the culture that told me anyone who wasn't straight was living a lie. I thought of how I became part of the statistic that gave my Christian university the nickname of "divorce factory" because my ex-wife and I were both so repressed. I thought of all the times I tried to speak up against what I thought was wrong, but people didn't listen to me because I must not have looked or acted the part of a serious-enough Christian. I thought of my professors letting me down over-and-over when they had the chance to do something about these wrongs, and it made me angry.
I thought of all the times I had relapsed. I thought of how caving to my sex addiction time and time again brought me further from the person I needed to be, further from being a husband to Sasha and a leader in my community. I thought of how I wouldn't propose to him until I had reached one solid year of sobriety, and how I had never broken four months before. I thought of the gap beyond who I could be and who I am, and how hungry my body was that I didn't care, and it made me angry.
And so, I painted that anger.
I revisited the reference shoot from Beads in the I AM ANIMA series, and tried to paint how it felt to be that angry, in all those directions. I wanted something primal and aggressive. Ramses, again, takes the shape of my human frustrations. Distorted photographs of the repressive church I grew up in and the university chapels I was forced to attend make the texture surrounding him, radiating out of and into him.
The excitement of seeing the image develop into what it needed to be brought me more excitement than frustration. It was the start of my latest return to sobriety. Perhaps I should be more generous with painting vent art in the future. God was probably waiting for my righteous indignation to come out in a healthy way, like this. Let me speak this Truth into your hearts, my family. Sometimes, God's will for us may be that we go apeshit.
---
Don't forget to check the attached files for 4 versions of this image as a 16:9 (widescreen) and 9:16 (phone) wallpaper.
Love,
- J
![[RV]-Nobunaga from fanbox](https://unionfaps.com/kistorage/29149.jpg)
