Artist's story behind the artwork:
This painting was based on a sketch I created which documents some of the every day things I find important and that made/make me happy. I was also on mushrooms while painting this piece.
There are yellow petals in the bottom left part of the painting representing he sunflowers in the garden that had almost finished their bloom cycle and the flowers were about to fall. The sunflowers bloomed much later this year and grew over 8 feet tall I loved walking out to the garden to check on the every morning. There is also a Daruma doll to the left of the sunflowers. These dolls were modeled after Bodhidharma, the founder of the Zen tradition of Buddhism which I studied weekly when I was an apprentice under a Japanese Tattoo Master for 3 years.
My cousins husband gifted me some mushrooms for my birthday so Charmaine and I were Micro dosing every few days which was nice. I hadn’t done mushrooms again since I did a DMT trip years and years ago which made me loose my interest in hallucinogenics. I was also watching an amazing anime called Vinland Saga which told the story of several vikings in the past. There have always been several hypotheses that the Viking berserkers ingested a hallucinogenic mushroom (Amanita Muscaria), commonly known as fly agaric, just before battle to induce their trance-like state. Nothing is proven but I created the red mushroom relined in white in the top left of the piece.
Anime, a nice glass of wine, a very small doze of mushrooms, and some beautiful flowers to look at is certainly my happy place.