Not in the Pink

"Not in the Pink"

Painting by the Cancer Diva

Essay by Vincent Balckwood

Sometimes I fear I will never write again. I just lose all interest. I feel so blank and dead inside. I fear it might be a sign of a greater problem. It might be a symptom of my depression about to rise up out of my subconscious like a horrible Leviathan. It will pull me down through dark waters again. Will this be the time I don’t come back?

That's the thing with depression. It is something you can try to control but something you never escape. Like a ghost it is always in the background haunting me. Only someone who has been through it can truly understand that thing inside me. The thing that is trying to hurt me.

Cancer Diva (CD) understands. She knows the monster called depression even better than I. I flatter myself by saying we are kindred spirits. I’m happy to say we are friends. Three months ago, she was going to show me her favorite Andy Warhol prints at the Mayo Clinic and we would sketch each other. I was nervous as hell. I had to get new pencils, a new pad. She went to the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. I didn't want to embarrass myself by looking like a complete amateur. Normal people get a hair cut or new clothes for a dinner. Art Geeks get new pencils and drawing pads.

But the day before our grand adventure, she went for a check up. They found she had cervical cancer and had to operate right away.“Great,” she told me, “clinical depression and now this -- not a great mix!”

I vowed to keep her spirits up in my humble way. I'd write stories, send her cards, drawings and little happy place boxes. I wanted to do anything to keep the monster from dragging CD away. I decided it was part of my job description; to help her find her happy place. (Her mother later told me that CD look forward to getting mail. It, she said, really helped bring a smile to her face on the hard days. That made me feel very good. Thanks, mom.)

My friend, Tom, gave CD a sketch book and CD said that she was going to fill it with her feelings during the hard days ahead. I knew it would take her away from her problems if only for a moment. And I knew it was also a kind of magic that could cure so much.

Three months later after so much pain, radiation and chemo therapy we got together to show each other our art work and sketch each other. It was during really horrible, icy, bitter cold weather, but CD wouldn't cancel. She HAD to get together.

She did it because she is such a good friend. But she also has reason to be proud of her drawings; portraits of the emotions that were haunting her. Snap shots of the monsters. The first one I saw I call "Not in the Pink". It is so intensely personal. Only CD could have drawn it and only CD could have drawn it at that very moment. It shows a storm of emotions that will never be again. She was about to begin a journey that would change her forever. But this was the beginning. This was someone about to step off the cliff uncertain if the parachute would work. Before her was the dark unknown.

Before the surgery CD looked to see if she could spy the cancer. What she saw and drew effected me as much as Van Gogh's Starry, Starry Night. After all both are intensely stylized landscapes but CD has become her own landscape. In the yellow center is a spooky wishbone which is the cancer -- or its effect on CD's body. Above it I see her wonderfully stylized hand. The entire design, the amazing use of color and pillowy textures all make something painfully beautiful.

It is the pull of opposites: terror and stress played against calming, peaceful feelings that gives the work such power. I look at it again and again and keep seeing new things to love and be passionate about. It makes me want to grab people and demand them to look at it -- and understand everything that CD went through to produce it. This isn’t something she wanted to paint. It is something she had to paint -- a matter of life and death. She looked right at the monster and drew flowers around it. Now that’s cool!