ALEX TOYS MY ART

I chose this room for my studio when we moved in here. It's at the back of the third floor. I thought it was the place where I would be most able to concentrate on work. I have a decent easel bought from my college design teacher and a drawing table. There's a sturdy table Elliot made by one wall, it is stacked with big sheets of Arches paper that may, one day, become drawings. Under the table are bins with ancestral documents that were in a cousins attic a stuff from my mothers house also the architectural plans for Eastern State Penitentiary, another trash find.

My art books are in shelves lining the hall wall just outside of the studio and in shelves lining the adjourning little room along with favorite fiction including lots of Collette, Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin and Willa Cather.

The room faces west so it gets great light. I don't paint and draw much but I do lots of photo projects here. The window might look familiar.

The studio is filled with a lot of things. Things from my past. Three child size rocking chairs for instance. One belonged to my mother's father one of my only Walters family items, the little black one was mine (one of a pair, my sister Kathy has the other, they matched my mother's big rocker, also in the studio) and the wicker one was from our summer cottage a Hibbard relic.

In the corner by the door to the hallway is a set of deep Ikea shelves. Liza, my mother's doll and a favorite subject of mine, is in a doll crib on the top shelf next to the Japanese lady sent to us by my childhood exchange student Miko's mother.

On one shelf there are all sorts of things from the wooden shoe that was always on my grandmother's mantle with Flanders 1917 written on it to a carved ostrage egg, a gift from a friend in grad school, that encloses one of the last apples from my grandmother's Northern Spy apple tree. The apple is small and studded with cloves just like the first apple from the tree, even smaller than this, that used to be in my grandmother's china cabinet. This apple reminds me of the jars of canned apples lining the shelves in Nanny's basement where we played when we were little.

All of these thing bring back stories, flashes of images, the sound of voices long gone. I could box a lot of this up and put it in the attic but then I wouldn't hear my grandmother's or mother's and father's voices telling the stories.

Under the Ikea shelves are two trunks from my grandmother's attic. When I was in my twenties I would spend days at her house rummaging in the boxes in her attic and basement. when I found something interesting I'd take it to the kitchen and we'd talk about it. For example, I found a china sheep, this was the story about it.

My great grandmother came from Denmark when she was seven and this was the toy cow she brought with her. They sold their farm and all came at the urging of the Christensen family who had settled in Alden PA. They came to work in the mines as did all of my Welsh ancestors.

Their family name was Bush, but not really, it was actually Neilsson but they lived down by the bushes so they became Bush. Bush is the name on their gravestones but not on my great grandmother's marriage certificate which says that Mary Nelson married James Bryan. Her name was originally Bodil Marie Neilsson. She hated the name Bodil.

In the middle of the floor is the box that my great grandmother's brother made for my grandmother's china paints. Uncle Conrad, pronounced Conerd, lived at the lake, was a great turtle hunter, and had one arm. We used to visit him, he had a big conch shell, you could hear the ocean if you put it up to your ear.

Looking at these thing makes me want to tell the stories. Talk about the Benny the Badger stories my father would tell us at bedtime, and the hair wrapped in silk. It's my grandmother's hair, saved when she had it bobbed in the twenties.

If I don't tell the stories no one will know what these things are and why I keep them.
Clearly I'm a little nostalgic.But I know stories that others in my family don't.

I don't have the Welsh stories, just that one of my Welsh my great grandfathers was a powerful coal mine boss and great grandmother taught my Uncle Bill to say mochyn diawl pronounced mochyn jawl meaning devil pig. He apparently was a little red haired rascal, traded my mother for a bicycle!

Photo and text from Mind Out for Mental Health's 1 in 4 project, 2002.

It all started to go wrong following a spinal injury when I was in the fire service. I was 35 and spent the next few years trying to prove I was capable of keeping a job - trying to be better than anyone else, in other words trying to be the indispensable man. It led to perfectionism and obsessive compulsive behaviour. I would check things again and again ...and again.

The children were growing up around me but I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t able to handle simple things like paying the bills; I couldn’t tell anyone because of the shame. My wife will tell you I cried for three weeks continually. Then on February 7th I thought “that’s it, I’m a burden to everyone.” I bought a bottle of spirits and some pain killers and took the train to Conway. I intended to finish myself off but while I made a good job with the bottle I didn’t do much with the tablets.

When my wife came to find me the first thing she said was “Is it something I’ve done?” That hurt a lot. When the psychologist saw me he said it was trauma and I believed him. Back at work I seemed to put myself back together again; the fire service didn’t know I had a mental health problem because I didn’t know myself. Life just felt very uncomfortable.

When I eventually left the fire service in 1992 I planned to make wooden toys in my shed in the garden but then it was broken into and all my tools were stolen. My self-esteem was rock bottom. Rank and position provides you with a niche in life and when that’s taken away you have nothing. People are judged by what they do so suddenly I was nobody.

One day I was tidying the house and getting ready for some exchange students when I sat down on the carpet and cried my eyes out. I just kept saying “I don’t know what to do”. So my wife called the doctor and I spent the next nine weeks as a voluntary patient in the psychiatric hospital. Eventually I came to the Fountain Project as a volunteer and now I have a job there. We all live with and manage mental illness. When we have our down days we support each other.

My wife has been amazing. She had to deal with doctors, lawyers, tribunals, insurance companies, as well as bringing up three children and doing a job. I doubt I’d have survived without her.

Good friends will be good friends no matter what happens, but there are others who shy away from the fact you’ve got a mental illness. It boils down to whether they were friends after all. If you tell them you’ve got a spinal injury they’ll listen, but talk about depression and they switch off.

When I came out of hospital I realised that a person who hasn’t made a mistake has made nothing. Before if I’d cut a bit of wood wrong I’d give up; now I go back and measure again. I realised problems could be put right. In outside relationships it meant admitting to mistakes. Honesty with yourself and others is a primary factor to getting better.

FACT: In a survey by Mind in 2001, 62% of respondents said that the main barrier to recovering from mental health problems was the attitude of the general public. (Mind, 2001)

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