It was like a mirror to my mind and maybe my soul

During my time working on documenting the restoration of Bloomfield manor I also did some artwork based upon photos I had taken of the house. Some of these works were drawings and others were digital manipulation of various photos. These other projects were less about the house itself and more about my own struggles. The restoration was a metaphor for what I was working on in my life, and some of the darker works were evocative of how I felt my life had become as I entered into and passed out of my teenage years. For a long time I was afflicted by gloominess and unhappiness, and this manifested in so much of my artwork. The images of the abandoned and damaged house, all creepy and foreboding looking, was like a mirror to my mind and maybe my soul. I remember at the time actually having dreams about Bloomfield, dreams of it being restored but also of some very dark places remaining within. In the dreams, most of the house was cleaned up and restored, but a few rooms and areas remained dark and terrifying. I’d open a door and there would be nothing but blackness, existential dread and horror inside. There were simply some places in that house of my dreams that no one, including myself, would ever want to go. Or even to look into. Dreams like this did not confine themselves only to Bloomfield, but rather I used to have lots of dreams about being in a building where parts of it was terrifying and forbidding. It might be a house, an office building, an industrial complex, apartments or whatever. But there would always be somewhere, possibly a whole floor, where I was to terrified to enter but always ended up in those areas and trying to escape them. Luckily I seldom have those dreams these days. The house in my dreams still has some dark spaces, but not as many as it did in my younger days. These are drawings and other images where I incorporated parts of Bloomfield from photos I had taken.

This last set is a triptych as a metaphor of the desolation, then hope, and final restoration.