Fran Duggan Art

Bobby Bakers show, Diary Drawings, is a exceptional look into mental health over the past 3 decades. An observant approach to broach a subject that has long been buried.

With deteriorating mental health in the mid 1990s, Baker was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and under went a journey, spanning the best part of a decade, through a system that many people to this day do not understand or view it as a weakness to be in that situation in the first place. In bakers own words she had taken a step into hell but was still living in the real world”. to keep her sense of humour and her art together through these times is a testament to her character.

There is a surrealist quality (unsurprising really due to the nature of her confinement) in the drawings. some dream-like qualities but in others some nightmarish views of her predicament. In the image Day 12, we see a picture of what appears to be a calm face. Using simple lines and colours the portrait seems to me, in all intents and purposes to be a quiet image of contemplation, but the unnerving aspect is the 2nd set of lips which could convey another psyche attempting to break free of the confides of the artists mind. Skip forward to image 25 and you see a the 2nd psyche, the mental anguish, escaping its prison to unleash a fury.

Bakers struggle through this nightmare was helped eventually through CBT and a psychotherapist who appears in her work. Her final outcome was to put on a show of the work in what I believe to be a continuation of her therapy. A therapy that had horrific fall backs throughout .In one picture her own psychiatrist is portrayed as a monster brandishing a meat clever as if to portray the hacking away at her therapy.

To give these struggles to the outside world, to allow people to appreciate the nightmares of your life can, in my opinion be only beneficial. This is a subject matter hidden away from the light of day and we are only just scratching the surface of what goes on within our mind. Bobby Baker deserves every credit for making this possible, for coming through the system and for sharing it with us all.

Was attempting to blur an image I’d painted. My problem here was, I do not allow thinks to sit. I went back at it way to early, muddied the paints and made a pig’s ear of it. But that’s all part of the process i suppose. Trying to learn from my mistakes.

I need to have more patience when it comes to painting with Oils. But, during this time of lockdown, I managed to spend 8 hours in the Studio at University!!!

In this still, I was trying to convey the absolute paralytic feeling that completely takes hold of you when you finally hit rock bottom. It’s a stunning feeling of pure dread that grips you, it doesn’t let go unless you get help.

I decided to use a still from a TV show (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that shows a woman who has just died of natural causes. The feelings you receive during the turmoil of utter depression are extremely similar, you can’t move. You want to end it.

This was another piece in Oils on Canvas with a limited pallet.

Further responses to a mini project I set myself looking at Mental illness. In this I wanted to respond to the word Depression. There is a thin line between manic and happy. This is originally a still from the Film, The Wall by Alan Parker where our protagonist finally succumbs to madness. To me, this shows the black hole that we all circle in our fight for mental wellbeing, some of us fall into it though and the decent to madness begins.

This came about after some research into the word fear in popular culture. What makes it, how do we truly respond to it.. Do we run, can we run? What if we can’t? What if fear simply grips us until we are eaten alive ?