Lillian Heckler Portfolio

october 2023

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, virtual art exhibitions are a newly-popular method of introducing the population to the fine arts while simultaneously maintaining accessibility. The seasoned art critic and the average viewer alike may form opinions on paintings, muse about artists, and critique curations from the comfort of their bedrooms. In a world before the Coronavirus, though, online platforms would occasionally allow underground artists to experience mainstream popularity. In 2011, Tennessee artist Bryan Lewis Saunders experienced this phenomenon when internet forums turned the work in his sketchbook into a virtual art exhibition of its own.

Saunders has created a self-portrait of himself every day since January 1995, allowing his differing circumstances and biases to inform the journey that his creativity embarks on each particular day. He develops “sensory experiments” to alter his perception of reality, including thirty days fully blind and multiple days of torture. The title of the experimental series that gained him the most notoriety is “Under the Influence.” The series is a collection of self-portraits that he completed over thirty days in 2001, during which he ingested a different drug daily.

The residents of his run-down apartment complex supplied him with drugs like Lexapro, Xanax, and crystal methamphetamine so he could carry out the experiment, which eventually gave him minor brain damage. He drew his final portrait of the series–before taking a break from the ingestion of copious amounts of drugs–while on synthetic cathinones, a man-made drug also known as bath salts. Synthetic cathinones increase brain and central nervous system activity similarly to MDMA and cocaine, but they are more dangerous and less predictable than most party drugs. Bath salts cause significant time, color, and sound distortions, accompanied by hallucinations and paranoia. 

A glance at Saunders’ Bath Salts feels like a hallucinogenic experience in itself. The graphite-on-paper drawing is messy, chaotic, and deeply unsettling. Saunders utilizes thin, exact lines and grants little attention to shading–the picture lies flat on the paper, staring thoughtlessly up at the viewer. The jagged pencil strokes and misplaced shapes create the distorted bust of a man with an oblong head and eyes that are voids of darkness. 

From the slanted facial expression to the animalistic teeth poised into a grin–which feels more like a threat of being eaten–there is no peace in this drawing. There is no space for the viewer to rest their eyes and relax. Even the white space feels abrasive, like a reminder of nothingness rather than a clean place for thought and interpretation. The greyscale color scheme drains the energy out of the drawing, and the exhaustion felt after days of consuming hard drugs infects the viewer. A scattered brain seeps out of the subject’s skull and spreads down the side of his face, representing Saunders’ melting psyche after he took one of the most potent stimulants made by man.

Saunders believes that drugs make him ugly, that the drawings he made of himself on drugs are ugly, and that the explosion of popularity in his “Under the Influence” series romanticizes the use of drugs. Thus, he refuses to display his pieces to large audiences for profit, as he does not wish to support the connection of the use of drugs to what is considered ingenious. In Bath Salts, the exhausted, melting subject of the portrait begs the viewer to save him–to save themselves, to avoid drugs at all costs.