Bipolar Blues

This piece is an acrylic finger painting, and a self portrait. I studied the subtle emotion in my eyes from two different photos. In the photo depicted on the left, I was going through a phase of mania and experimenting with a lot of drugs in college. On the right i've painted a photo from a time in my life where I was making my first attempts to feel more real as a human being. I guess it took me about a year to realize I didn't want to keep wandering around the basement of myself anymore. Everything shifted, my relationships, friendships, even the music I listened to changed. I made it a point to only listen to black women for a long while. Willow Smith and Solange were really crucial to my unwraveling and rebuilding myself.