Artist Bio |
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The artist speaks about art as therapy,
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My name is Joe Moorman, and I was born in Greenville, Mississippi in 1967. Most days I feel like I am a real-life version of Navin R. Johnson from Steve Martin's "The Jerk." Only that might be shooting too high. Seriously. It is extremely difficult for me to deal with people, and I know from experience that I often seem like an idiot or a jerk in normal social situations. I have Aspergers Syndrome. They didn't know what to call it when I was in school. They just knew I was "a dumb ass in every way except for knowing how to read books about ants or volcanos or some shit like that." And I wouldn't stop drawing in class. And I was immature and obnoxious. The condition is biologically-based, and so I'm genuinely not sure what came first: the immaturity and the obnoxious personality I still struggle with or the constant ridicule I got nearly all the time back then. I have an engineering degree from Mississippi State. After the engineering degree, I hung out in grad school in Athens, Georgia for a while to work on a novel. The novel was crap. The graduate degree was a second technical degree, so for a while I thought I was really wasting my life. There were several spurts of painting during that period, but only a few of the canvasses survive. I also produced sculptural pieces, clothing, functional items, stuff for rituals, etc., and these always got great compliments from the people who saw them, but I never thought that making art could be a full time occupation, at least not for someone like me. Nothing seems to be possible when you are battling chronic depression. For years, my sister urged me to seek help, but I was reluctant to do anything that required that I trust other people, especially when it involved allowing them to influence my thoughts, emotions or beliefs. Therapy seemed just like another belief system to me, and I already considered myself to be a recovering Mormon in the same way people talk about being a recovering Catholic. As for medication, the idea of having to admit that I needed medication was equivalent to admitting just how sick I was, and for some reason I was unable to do that. Maybe that was because I had spent my entire life striving to be "normal" in spite of constantly being belittled and reminded that I was anything but normal. I finally reached the end of my rope in 1999, and got help through antidepressants, which still seem like a miracle to me. It was like a switch going off. It was like I could suddenly do anything I wanted: start a business, become a professional artist, get married, socialize at the bar, whatever. Why did I write these stories?At moments of extreme crisis, I have delusions that God is talking to me. This has only happened a handful of times, mostly when I was in the fifth grade. I wrote for years trying to find a way to explain it without talking about the ways my parents may have contributed to the problem.
Only premonitions of death finally convinced me to write about it in an honest way while my sister Lydia and I are still both in this world. Otherwise, I would not be telling such uncomfortable stories. I published this project when I told my sister I had doubts about the stories and their emotional consequences, and she told me I absolutely had to keep it up and not change anything for those reasons. It's probably appropriate that my sister be the absolute final judge in this matter because she had a worse time than I did, causing mental problems so severe that it destroyed her physical health. But there aren't any "bad guys" in my stories, not really. I have little doubt that the Mississippi Delta I grew up in was a cake walk compared to what my parent's experienced. It beat them down so badly that it made their virtues shine larger than life. I remember my father coming home from work one day and acting strangely, like something had him angry and more serious than usual, in a more sober way. I helped him in the shop like I sometimes did, but he was very self-conscious in the way he spoke to me. He said please and thank you repeatedly as I handed him tools back and forth, and he went to great lengths not to bark at me, even when he lost all patience with the stripped-out bolt and started pounding the engine block with a hammer. After he was done banging the head off the bolt, he threw the hammer out the back door of the shop and into the junk yard. He didn't say anything for the longest time. Then he looked me in the eye very seriously and said, "I know you already know this, but if I ever catch you forgetting to say 'Yessir and Nossir' to a black man, I mown be on yo ass same as if it was a white man. Don't you be like some people." I'd prefer to write those kind of stories, but those stories don't give much insight into the hallucinations. It has to be the embarrassing and disturbing stories if you are going write a real account of why you are on-a-mission-from-God crazy. My sister Lydia and I have talked about books and art ever since we first discovered that we loved each other instead of hating each other's guts. Lydia has her PhD in English and is a professor teaching Southern literature.
Here is a poem I wrote about pursuing my true path as an artist.
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