( Drawn under 4mg. of Dilaudid )
" ...today we live in a narcissistic and obsessive culture,
totally overflowing with drugs. And as an artist I am the filter... "
Bryan Lewis Saunders is an artist without any doubt --- when he creates things, people break down and cry. In short, he is a great leader of catharsis and true emotional expression in a modern world of nervous silence.
Although Saunders is renowned mostly for his spoken word poetry, he has earned himself a fair deal of notoriety with one specific project of his - testing and artistically showing the effects of various illicit substances. Each day, through a series of self portraits, Bryan Lewis Saunders opens a new chemical doorway - and sketches his visions and experiences of the unknown pleasures that lie waiting beyond.
dinosaurcity had the chance to sit down with Bryan Lewis Saunders and discuss his personal tribulations with this project. This is the transcript:
How old are you?
BLS: Almost 42.
Where are you from?
BLS: I was born in Washington D.C. but I've lived in Tennessee off and on for so long that I tell people that I'm from there.
What led to the decision to start these self-portraits under the influence of various drugs?
BLS: Well
I've drawn/painted at least one self portrait every day since March
30th of 1995 and on some days I experiment with drugs. However, the
drug series itself began in 2000 when I moved into an 11 story building
with the idea that I would make a documentary on all of the interesting
characters there. The building, is well known in Johnson City for its
creeps and loonies.
After moving in, one of my good friends Jennifer
Renfro, from art school purchased an old church nearby and was turning
it into a house to live in. While finishing the downstairs flooring she
died in her sleep when it caught fire.
The day after her funeral my
best friend Don Morgan, also from art school, shot himself in the head,
in one temple and out the other with a Russian .32 and survived!
Unfortunately he ended up with severe brain damage and permanent
confusion. While he was still in the hospital my right lung collapsed
for the third time (spontaneous pneumothorax), and I had a lobectomy in
which they removed the top half of my lung to prevent it from collapsing
again.
Meanwhile my other best friend, Brandon Bragg, was on the
Appalachian Trail Thru-Hiking from GA to ME. experiencing great and
wonderful things in nature. Once I myself got out of the hospital and
Don was sent to a nursing home, Brandon was hiking in nearby Damascus,
VA and convinced me to continue the journey with him. I had never been
hiking before and with only 1 1/2 lungs I put my life in his hands.
It
was incredible. I had 5 pounds of art supplies with me! Every day I
saw tons of beautiful things in nature. I'm from the city and so every
new kind of bark I saw, or toadstool, or wild animal gave me such a rich
wealth of phenomenon to draw and see myself in a totally different
world. That experience was truly miraculous and healing. (To this day
that book is my favorite of all of the self-portrait books.)
( Huffing Lighter Fluid )
Anyway,
back to the drugs.
While Brandon and I were hiking one day he asked me,
"Whatever happened with that documentary you were going to make with
the veterans and the loonies?"
And I told him how everything had
happened so fast with the tragedies and how I thought the people would
be really interesting to document, but in fact they were all on drugs,
suffering in solitude, some too obese to physically leave their
apartment, and for many it was all they could do to get out of their
recliners 3 times a day. And I told him how when I first moved in, a
paraplegic in a wheelchair showed me an encyclopedia of pills and said
he could find at least one of every kind of pill in that book in the
building and that book was huge!
When Brandon and I got to NY, I
unknowingly became very dehydrated and started hallucinating and had a
psychotic break and ditched him at a monastery because I thought he was
trying to poison me. I took the greyhound straight back to Tennessee
where I had an epiphany. I thought not only am I going to draw myself
everyday, I'm going to do a different drug everyday, after all there was
one of everything in the building...
And that was when I officially
started the project.
What were your favorite substances consumed? What were the worst?
BLS: Xanax
(totem poles - 4mg) would probably be one of my favorites. It made me
feel real at peace with life and with the trauma, and it also made me a
real social dynamo! I'm sort of a recluse but with the Xanax I could
just walk up and talk to total strangers! The Butane Honey Oil was a
real blast too!
The worst is a toss up between PCP and Seroquel (heavy
tranquilizer/anti-psychotic agent) 100 mg. I went to a doctor to
hopefully get more different drugs and told him about my project and
showed him my pictures on various drugs and he only wrote one
prescription for 90 Seroquels thinking I was psychotic for taking such
an undertaking and it was awful!
I always saw the lion in Africa on TV
with the hurt foot getting shot with a tranquilizer dart and assumed
that that lion was woozy and in lala land! Boy was I wrong. In
reality, that lion actually wants to tear out those people's throats
with awe inspiring savagery but it just can't move. At least that is
how the Seroquel did me. It's a long story but as you can see from the
drawing I had to fight against its effects, and it took every ounce of
strength I had!
( Ladies and gentlemen, PCP! )
The PCP was just as bad. Any drugs that detach your mind from your body
I don't care for too much. The PCP day I ate a ham sandwich with
tomatoes in it and people kept knocking on my door asking if they could
look at my Appalachian Trail self-portraits and I'd get to telling about
20 people at a time all of my hiking stories and showing them all of my
drawings and then all of sudden someone would whisper, "Bryan, these
people aren't real." And I would flip the hell out! Because even the
person that whispered that wasn't real. And then there would be another
knock at the door and more people would come in wanting to see my
pictures and they too weren't real.
What's crazy is, my friend Audra
said that she really did knock on my door and could hear me talking in
there but I wouldn't answer it. It was all I could do to draw myself
vomiting on PCP, and each time I heaved my face shifted off in stages
and red clumpy chunky stuff kept coming out of my nose. I thought my
brain was hemorrhaging, but it turned out it was just tomato from my
sandwich. Thankfully.
Before the self-portraits, how experienced were you with
these substances? Were there any you did the first time with these
experiments?
BLS: I've always experimented with drugs to
some extent, and when I was much younger I had a couple of seizures on
cocaine binges, but many of them were new to me. Most of the pills were
new and some of the huffing.
People that don't 'really' know me often
think I'm a party animal because of this body of work, but in truth I
will only do a drug for the drawing/experience and if I've never done it
before. Some drugs I have already done, but it was before I began
drawing myself every day so I'll do it again under the influence.
( 2mg. of Xanax )
I've
snorted Heroin several times, but I've never done a drawing on Heroin
because I haven't had the opportunity since I started the project. I
only do drugs that people donate to the project. All all that I really
care about is how drugs change my perception of the self. As the
scientist and the 'lab rat' I often have to wait to be in the perfect
place in life and in the perfect frame of mind and in the right
environment with the right people or alone which can take months
sometimes to get all of that aligned. I do this to drastically limit
possible outside factors that may complicate the self-perception.
From an artist's perspective, what drugs have been the most useful for you?
BLS: I
would say none of them were very 'useful' outside of just sharing a one
time unique experience. Adderall did seem to give me a lot of patience
and focus, but I wouldn't say it was more useful than Salvia which I
started drawing right before taking and finished by painting right
after.
Even I, who has conditioned myself to draw while in a drunken
blackout and not remember it, still can't draw when completely
obliterated or on a different planet, so I try not to overdo it. The
act of drawing is much more useful than any drug.
( The artist, having snorted a 10mg. Lortab )
On your website, you mention that you became "lethargic and
suffered mild brain damage" because of this experiment - can you
elaborate on the after effects?
BLS: Well, in the beginning I
got carried away and became enamored with the uniqueness of how the
different drugs made me see myself and how each one had its own special
quality. And after a few days or so the excitement was really building
up in me, As to were the different drugs. And as soon as the effects of
one would wear off I'd just do another one without thinking about any
harm I was causing myself.
And then when the word got out about the
project people started really showing up at my door with all kinds of
stuff, I mean really cleaning out their medicine cabinets for me. So
the day after someone showed up with 2 bottles of Robotussin and a can
of lighter fluid.
My friend Audra saw my pictures and the breaking down
of my mental state and said, "Look! Bryan! You're giving yourself
Down Syndrome!" (to put it nicely). And sure enough I had been mixing
the wrong drugs with each other for days and gave my self mild-brain
damage without even knowing it. Luckily not permanent and thankfully
she was there to even spot it. It was quite some time before I tried a
new drug again.
( The onset of two Psilocybin Mushroom caps )
Are these experiments still going?
BLS: Yep,
the drawing still goes on. Never missing a day. Just finishing up my
89th book of self-portraits and quickly approaching 8,000 in all.
Not
all of them on drugs of course, but from time to time when the situation
presents itself and an interested party donates a new one I'll do it.
But only on my own terms, like I said everything has to be just right I
only do it for the drawing.
What's next? Where's the acid?
BLS: As far as acid goes, I've tried acid 3 times in NE Tennessee and all 3
times it was really crappy. Nothing like the U.V.A. acid in the mid
eighties. People here say, "I did 8 of 'em. I took 4. I did 6 of
'em.". And I'm like, "If one doesn't do it for you, why take 7 more?
That's ignorant!"
As for what's next, it all depends on what people
give me. I don't seek them out and there are still plenty of big ones I
need to draw under the influence of; Heroin, LSD, DMT, Computer Duster,
Ayahuasca, Peyote and I don't want to die until I do a self-portrait on
Crack. You see today we live in a narcissistic and obsessive culture,
totally overflowing with drugs. And as an artist I am the filter.
Picasso and Matisse got it right when one of them said, "Cézanne is the
father of us all." It's not a stretch by any means to say, "On some
days, my brain chemistry is my vantage point and my face is his Mont
Sainte-Victoire."
( The artist, having snorted 15mg of Buspar )
For people interested in this particular body of work, my Facebook
has the best and most up to date collection of drawings under the
influence. And I'm a weird person, and I'm way more well known for other
stuff besides the drawings and drugs...
To look more into the world of Bryan Lewis Saunders, please visit his website.