Painting The Complex Nature of Marijuana

This newly completed painting which I’ve titled “Marijuana” has been two years in the making. Sure it’s detailed, but why did it take so long, you may ask?

“Marijuana” Acrylic on board 24x48”

Well, that’s not two years of sitting patiently at the easel, working on it obsessively everyday, nose an inch from the surface white-knuckling a one-hair brush. No, it took so long because I was basically afraid of it and would leave it untouched for months at a time. The amount of detail was intimidating for one thing, but also I was afraid I was going to screw it up, or I wouldn’t be able to get it right. And also, as is the case with a lot of my paintings, I would get to a place where I simply didn’t know how to continue.

I tend to have trouble seeing clearly what I want out of a painting. I can’t exactly see in my minds eye what I want, but once I lay something down on the canvas, I can see if I don’t like it. I’ll often repaint the same area over and over trying to get it right. This painting was particularly challenging I think because I had big expectations for myself, and a difficult message to convey regarding marijuana’s nature, which I’ll explain later.

Cannabis often helps me cut through all of what I just described. It puts me in the here and now, connected more clearly with my senses, and puts me in a place of visual clarity where I can better see the painting in my minds eye and thus take away most of the fear and doubt that might be holding me back from deeply connecting with my work. I had the idea when I started painting this that I would only work on it when I was under the influence of cannabis. It seemed like a fun experiment to approach it this way. But there was a problem with this approach.

Cannabis is a plant that I have a complex relationship with. A plant that I deeply love and respect, but it’s also a plant I’m becoming increasingly incompatible with. I love what it does for my creative process and the superhuman focus I get which can put me in the zone for hours. The problem for me now is that the side effects outweigh the benefits. Side effects can show up as depression, lack of motivation and more. I’m fine while actually high, it’s the next day when I wake up that the trouble might start. And it gets worse the longer I smoke it.

A few months into painting this portrait of Marijuana I hit a wall, I was feeling overwhelmed by the accumulated side effects of smoking on a daily basis. Even though I was far from finishing the painting, I decided I needed to stop smoking for awhile and I put this painting aside too while I took a break. Over the next year and a half I would try smoking off and on while it worked on this piece for awhile, get derailed again and stop. Then start again…

While working with cannabis in this on and off again way, I longed to find a respectful relationship with it, and was looking closely at many different factors, including strain, edible vs smoking, THC content and so on. I discovered that probably the most important aspect for me was dose, and that the right dose was a fine line. I’m very sensitive and don’t need much to put me into the creative flow for hours.

My preferred dose would be considered a micro dose to most people; about 1 or 2 grams. With this small dose, I’m checked into my body in a nice way without being too distracted with actually feeling high and spending more time with a bag of cookies than a paint brush. A gentle dose like this grants me a connection with my art that is hard if not impossible to reach other wise. But even a little too much has the opposite effect and I’ll start wasting time and making mistakes that need to later be fixed when the fog rolls away.

Furthermore, I find that if I take the exact same amount each time my tolerance doesn’t change as much and I can stay at a small dose. Edibles are great for getting a more accurate amount each time. Because I’m using cannabis as a tool for focus and not chasing an experience, it’s easy for me to find satisfaction with this way of working with the plant. Honestly, I don’t really enjoy the feeling of being overly high on cannibis. Maybe you do, nothing wrong with that. But I’m very aware now that cannabis, like any other medicine, can be overdosed, and in fact it must be the most misunderstood and abused plant we have available to us.

Because it’s harder to deem what an overdose looks like with this relatively harmless plant (except for that time you ate to many edibles) it’s easy to normalize an overdosed state and regularly get rippin’ baked on dab hits and lost in a thick haze for hours or days (months or years) at a time while steadily increasing your dose as your tolerance increases. Unfortunately this seems to be the normal way of working with this plant. This is a shame because I think there’s a beauty to be discovered when working with cannabis in a more balanced way.

In an effort to understand cannabis’s subtleties better and to establish a healthy relationship with it, I started trying to connect to it without actually using it. The idea came to me one afternoon that I should be able to learn from the plant while high, and then access these lessons later when sober. I would consider this a kind shamanic approach to working with plants. I tried this approach without much success at first, but one afternoon near the end of the painting when I had not been smoking,  I was in the zone with the painting when I started to get feelings of paranoia, as well as the feeling of heightened focus that I get when I’m high. That’s the only time I remember having an experience like that but I intend to keep trying that technique.

In the end, I finally finished the painting almost exactly 2 years after I started it. And I was high when I did! Ultimately I love how it turned out, although the initial concept that I was shooting for doesn’t come through as strong as I wanted, if at all. I wanted to capture the essence of the plant which is suggested in one of it’s most common names, marijuana. The name marijuana implies the plants powerful duality. Mary, as in the virgin, and Juana, which is slang for prostitute. Mary-juana. The light and the shadow.

The top of the painting is shooting rays of light and the bottom is in cool shadow…It’s subtle but I don’t think it really speaks to the complex spirit of marijuana the way it could. Still, two years is long enough and I’m calling it done!

Enjoy!

Comment below if you enjoyed this story or want to share your own insights into this powerful masterplant.