Artist Puts Together Collection of Self-portraits While on Different Drugs

The Morphine one is quite Ralph Steadman-esque.

The Klonopin one is priceless...

I think I dig the Psilocybin one the most.
 
The art is nice, but strikes me as a little gimmicky in that "hey, look at me, I'm on drugs! Aren't I edgy?" kind of way.
 
Putingrad said:
The art is nice, but strikes me as a little gimmicky in that "hey, look at me, I'm on drugs! Aren't I edgy?" kind of way.
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Yeah, unfortunately to get attention as an artist you often do need a gimmick. However, I don't believe it was intended that way. Bryan Lewis Saunders does have an immense body of other work - the drug self-portraits are only a tiny fraction of his work. Just one of his projects is doing at least one self-portrait every single day, which he has been doing since 1995. He explains that artists normally put themselves into representations of the world around them, while he is doing the opposite. "I put the world around me into representations of myself as I find this more true to my Central Nervous System". He was living in a building where a lot of people were using drugs and had just had some traumatic things happen in his life and started looking for other new experiences that might profoundly affect his perception of self. He claims he didn't use drugs very much before he came up with the idea to take a different drug every day and draw himself under the influence. A neighbour told him that every drug in a drug encyclopedia could be found in their building. He says he got really excited with the interesting ways the drugs were affecting his art. After a few weeks he became not able to handle it and decided to take greater periods of time between the drugs. He only takes drugs that are given to him. He says it's about trying as many different experiences as possible while he's alive.

ro4eva said:
Ew did I just see Zyprexa and Seroquel in his collection?
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He said that Seroquel was the scariest out of all the drugs he did :)
 
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