Featured Artist Flip Solomon

Artist Flip Solomon’s large-scale pen and ink images are drawn from dreams. See more of her fascinating work by visiting her website.

 

 

After a twenty-year hiatus, I came back to my art through circumstance. At the age of thirty-six, I found I was a workaholic, yet unable to hold down a job. I was a single mom and disabled—I’d been diagnosed with Narcolepsy, Klein-Levin Syndrome and Non-24—a trifecta of dysfunction that robbed me each day of six to ten waking hours.

 

 

Aside from the excessive sleeping, the slightest stressor would trigger my Narcolepsy and cause me to have sleep attacks in public. I threw myself into yoga and meditation with the primary hope that I could at least hold onto my driver’s license and retain a semblance of independence.

 

 

At the same time, I had no creative outlet. I was a single mom with problems. I’d basically been in survival mode for eight years, treating my body like a commodity and I felt empty, as if I was at a spiritual rock bottom.

 

 

In hindsight, I see now that I was at a tipping point and that what was to come had to be born out of that place of hopelessness.

 

 

I decided to return to my art and found a space that I shared with three other artists. It was a big studio and I immediately went large-scale. If I sat down at a desk or on a couch I was toast, but standing up and working against the wall or working on the cement floor helped me with wakefulness.

 

 

I worked at night whenever I was kid-free and I slowly started to work through my creative and emotional blockages. I’d been trained in classical graphite in my youth, but I now took up pen and ink which satisfied my love of contrast.

 

 

What felt so hopeless and chaotic at the time now seems like divine orchestration.

 

 

I couldn’t work a normal job, so I had to carve out my own career. The pressures of trying to stay awake in public and conforming to society’s version of time were too difficult, so I found a way to be alone. My circadian rhythms were off and I was nocturnal so I started working through the night, invoking nighttime’s mystical energy while simultaneously honoring my own cycles.

 

 

My excessive REM cycles gave me intense and vivid dreams, so I started drawing them. The waking REM cycles gave me hallucinations so I brought those patterns into my art. I couldn’t let myself get stressed out, so I meditated. The meditation cleared my dreams of all the clutter and let the higher concepts come through for my art.

 

 

The derealization and depersonalization that accompany my disorders make attachments difficult. I always feel a little bit outside of my body and not really real, more like I’m in a video game.

 

 

Yet these symptoms that make life so difficult for me also afford me a non-attached perspective to the point where I’m constantly being inspired by life here on earth. I feel fortunate that circumstance took me back to my art and that I now have a meaningful way of expressing my ideas to the world.

 

Artist Flip Solomon invites you to follow her on Instagram, Facebook and Skyline Art Editions.

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