Abstract

A good proportion of migraine art seems to resemble a modernist tendency towards the fragmentation of vision and distortion of its subject, as one sees in Cubist portraiture, for example. The representation of the head in migraine art may at first glance seem a little clichéd and obvious. However, this is not a literal self-portrait but an attempt to describe the inside of my head. As such, my migraine art has more in common with expressionism and surrealism. My work usually explores the nature of the visual distortions and the shifting of the migraine experience from wakefulness to sleep. As such, my work generally tends to be more abstract. I prefer to use photography and digital media, and not paint—the idea of pinpricks of light in a lightproof box, or of images that do not really exist seem apposite—though, here, I use paint on canvas. In this piece the migraine experience is explained in the language of expressionism: it is both anti-naturalistic and, to an extent, representational. It has a lot in common with neo-expressionism, in that it is evocative, rather than descriptive. It is an awkward piece that seems on the on the verge of dissolving.

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