What is all this?

“Who knew Nuclear Winter could be so beautiful?” said the optimist with her mouth hanging open in surprise. 2015, Watercolor and Ink on Paper, 9×12″, Krystal Booth.

The answer is Psycho Drawings.  The answer is a developing series.  The answer is going through so many micron ink pens that they need their own bank account.

Psycho drawings are based on two experiences when I was back in middle school and high school.  The primary one being the twisted little poems that we called Psycho Poems – usually only a page long – that I would make up for one of my best friends, Erica, when we were in High School Spanish class.  The more twisted the tale, the more she would laugh.  There was a lot of contextual setup for most of the stories and poems, and then the ending would be this twisted dark humor sort of thing.  It was like the Twilight Zone or Alfred Hitchcock Presents if written by bad writers.

The second inspiration for these works is due to Jason W. in 6th Grade Language class who used his workbook as the site for several inked masterpieces of war scenes and people climbing up lines of text with rope and ice picks.  The landscapes on the inside jackets of his books were especially action packed with fully developed landscapes filled with ground troops, falling rocks, helicopters entering the scene overhead, and strange characters that would change the situation completely.  Think a scene from Godzilla, but in ink with a lot of action lines.  And yes, he made sound effects as he drew.  I was fascinated and admired his confidence and comfort with an unforgiving medium when at the time, half of the pencil lines I drew were erased.

Fast forward about 180 years…and I had no idea these ideas would crop back up in my visual work, but here they are.  Like zombie ancestors with suitcases – showing that they intend to stay for a bit.

The important thing is that their creation is authentic in that I try not to force anything until it comes time for the title.  I give time to study the washes of watercolor, turning the dried page this way and that, to figure out what is there, and then pull the images out with my pen as they reveal themselves.  The titles are like the final thoughts in the Psycho Poems that I wrote for Erica – twisted or unexpected, and I still try to make her laugh.

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