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I recently discovered I have Hyperphantasia, which to be honest, I had no clue this isn't how most people experience life. This explains a lot about my life, as an artist and how I've lived so far.

Ever since I was young to escape I would drift off into elaborate and long daydreams, in which essentially I've lived half my life if not more in an alternate fantasy world in my head where I would create vast stories, scenes, characters, landscapes and everything else. This is where most of my art comes from, as there is a constant flow of vivid images and kind of like mental films playing in my head most all the time. It also explains a lot of my surrealism... as objects, colors, ideas, and shapes and everything else sort of morph and flow almost like hallucinations or something. It's like essentially creating a new painting in my mind's eye for every second there is in a day that I'm awake and conscious (unless I'm super focused on a particular task then they can recede). Most of them are too elaborate or complicated to create, but the ones that stick out to me I try to remember and create in some form. Needless to say I have a list of painting ideas and concepts that is so large I could never get around to producing them all in a lifetime, and the list just grows daily.

Come to find out this isn't how most people experience their lives (according to my research anyway). The mind and psychology is so fascinating to me to think about how one can go their entire life unaware of just how different their human experience can be based on even just one different variable of how their mind works.


The tragic Greek love story of Apollo and Hyacinth is a poetic gem that deals with the themes of love, envy, death, and rebirth, and is where the Hyacinth flower got it's name. My fascination with this story led me to paint the piece “Apollo et Hyacinthus.” I titled the piece after Mozart's first official opera of the same name, which he wrote at age 11. It was only performed once during his lifetime, and is based off of the same mythology surrounding the love story between Apollo and Hyacinth. The Story of Apollo and Hyacinth Hyacinth was a beautiful youth and lover of the god Apollo. Apollo taught to his lover the use of bow, of music and the lyre, the art of prophecy and exercises in the gymnasium. Hyacinthus was also admired by Zephyrus, the West Wind, and according to varied versions, by Boreas and Thamyris. One day Apollo and Hyacinth took turns throwing the discus. Hyacinth ran to catch it to impress Apollo, was struck by the discus as it fell to the ground, and died. A twist in the tale makes Zephyrus responsible for the death of Hyacinth. His beauty caused a feud between Zephyrus and Apollo. Jealous that Hyacinth preferred the radiant Apollo, Zephyrus blew Apollo's discus off course to kill Hyacinth.When Hyacinth died, Apollo did not allow Hades to claim the youth; rather, he made a flower, the hyacinth, from his spilled blood. This flower, on whose petals Apollo had inscribed the words "AI AI" - "alas" was considered by the Greeks to be the most beautiful of all flowers. Sources: Gantz, Timothy (1993). Early Greek Myth. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Kerenyi, Karl (1959). The Heroes of the Greeks. New York/London: Thames and Hudson. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyacinth_(mythology) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apollo_et_Hyacinthus

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