The Empath

On the painting underneath the painting, and what had to be destroyed for her to exist.

There is a painting underneath this painting. For me, that’s the realest part of this piece.

In 2012, I was painting something else entirely. Puzzle pieces, many hours of them, painted intricately and interlocking, 3D with shadowing, and each one a fragment I was fitting together to create a whole. I had a vision. I was going to make myself into a Picassoesque, shattered, cubist self-portrait, built piece by piece with my own two hands, proof that I could take all the fractured things and make it cohesive. I believed in that puzzle painting, and the hours I put into it solidified that belief.

Then I had a bad day. A real fuckin’ bad day.

I don’t even remember what exactly cracked my emotions open that day. That’s a deep aspect of dissociation, in that it leaves you with the wreckage and missing hours. I came home in the evening completely enraged, already drifting away from my own consciousness, and seething with an anger that went far beyond anything that transpired. It was heavy and somatic. I looked at the puzzle pieces on the canvas, all that patient, careful work, and something in me sneered at it. Stupid. Average. Not my true style.

I sat back. I smoked a joint. And then I picked up a brush, and I started slathering paint over every piece of the canvas, smother the puzzled face, and I went lucid for the next five hours.

I was present in my hands and strokes of color, but rage had my head floating in a space of unawareness, and it had a shape. It turned into this face, these eyes, and this dark bruise of a heart spread across her forehead, like a bursting of the pineal gland forcing self-love into my brain.

When I finally put the brush down, I looked at what I’d done and I felt gutted. I spent the next three or four days crying the kind of weeping that comes up from somewhere old and won’t be reasoned with. It has to release in almost a life-or-death urgency. It was one of the most painful things I’ve ever done to myself, and also one of the most freeing. Grief and relief arriving in the same body, all in one dancing rain cloud.

This is the only painting I have ever made with another painting sealed inside it. A palimpsest. A woman built directly on top of the thing I destroyed to find her.

I called her The Empath. Because that’s what empaths do, isn’t it; absorb what’s underneath? We take in the pieces other people have painted, carefully, dutifully, the shape they needed us to be, and we wear them until one day we can’t anymore, and something in us goes lucid and starts painting over all of it, grieving even as we do. Look at her eyes. They’re not shocked. They’re not even sad, exactly. They’re the eyes of someone who has seen it all and can never unsee any of it.

I didn’t set out to paint another self-portrait that day. But I got one anyway; truer than the cubist one I’d been so carefully assembling, because it wasn’t built from an idea of myself. It was built from the truth that emerged from beneath that idea.

I write to live. Some days, I paint that way too.

— Vennie

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