Pamela Stoicev

Hello friends!

If you’ve read my previous blog posts, you know a little or a lot about the concept of my work and my personal experience with psychedelics and how magic mushrooms and LSD jump started my spiritual journey.

The installation I envisioned came to life with the help of a tiny, square piece of paper, that I let marinate underneath my tongue.

Feeling the tingly sensations drive its way up my spine and expanding the back of my brain. Shaking my entire body into ecstasy and elevating my pineal gland.

& since my first experience with LSD, my entire thought process has evolved into its own creature.

There’s this stigma around psychedelics that they are sooo bad because they will turn you “insane.”

What really is insanity, anyway?

The beauty of psychedelics is that it opens your perception and heightens your awareness to the subtleties of your deepest fears.

It’s like one tiny square of LSD or an eight of mushrooms, can open your consciousness SO high, as if you’ve spent the last 50 years meditating non-stop.

It is all about the mind and how to explore the depth of your fears and what exactly is embedded within your mind. your being.

I have plenty of fears. and when I say plenty, I mean plenty.

An entire forest of fears! – however, what I also practice is discipline.

And when taking psychedelics, it is extremely important to practice discipline.

Because if discipline doesn’t exist in your vocabulary, your fears will certainly take control of you and as a result, make you INSANE.

Nonetheless, in my most recent blog post, I mentioned how my spiritual journey has taken me into immense healing.

and as a result, I’ve been struggling with consistent acne for about a year now. It seemed like at one point, it only got worse and worse and worse the more I focused on getting rid of it.

AND THATS INSANITY.

Focusing on your anxieties and becoming trapped within your thoughts.

Entangling yourself into a deeper mess and furthering the potential for your fears to dominate.

Recently, I am telling myself the opposite. That I don’t have acne and so I am slowly seeing improvement.

But, as you can see, it’s all about how much discipline you have over the negative thoughts that run through that nogin of yours!

No discipline, no sanity.

Regardless of the trauma I faced as a child, I do not have an excuse to allow my thoughts to take control of my consciousness.

This is why painting and exploring mental illness is so important to me.

My sister passed away from an overdose at 22 and was diagnosed with bipolar as an early teenager.

I have countless memories of both her maniac and depressive states of mind.

& growing up as a teenager myself, I almost wanted to be like her. I wanted to be bipolar.

It was like a safe place. Knowing there was something “wrong” with me. An excuse, for others to take my breakdowns seriously, and a way for me to manipulate others to feel bad for me.

It’s exactly that, an excuse…. now the word excuse is not the best word to use when describing mental illness. But, it is the best word to use when you choose to stay in your negative thought patterns without any effort to heal!!

WHAT IF, mental illness doesn’t have to be a permanent illness? What if it’s not even an illness?

WHAT IF, it’s a way for our Soul to communicate with us? To tell us what we need to work on.

Through my art practice, I desire to make paintings and installations that “mentally ill,” people can relate to.

AND FOR ME, a mentally ill person is just closer to their spiritual being than the common group of people. They feel their emotions to a larger extent compared to a “normal” person.

Mental illness is not an illness. It is not a bad thing.

WHAT IS A BAD THING, is when our society tells us we are crazy for having split personalities or seeing God.

If anything, OUR SOCIETY IS F***** mentally ill.

Maybe someone has split personalities because they have a lot of heavy turmoil to deal with? and maybe someone is delusion because they aren’t ready to accept reality? and so forth.

SO, why are we not allowing human beings to heal from their traumas and instead we prescribe “medicine” that pushes the issue even further into our subconscious.

My own spiritual healing is allowing me to heal my deepest fears. It’s allowing me to see life through the lens of God.

A higher perspective on what it means to be a human being.

Human beings are healers. We are creative beings. and when we ignore our creative sparks, we ignore being alive.

Diagnosing someone with a mental illness and telling them they HAVE to deal with this illness for the rest of their lives, is DENYING THEM TO FEEL ALIVE.

I think the next best move, as a society, is to start healing with plants. With what Earth has given us, naturally.

and it is Consciousness.

If magic mushrooms expand one’s perception of being, then we need to listen to what Earth is giving us.

After all, the human DNA is very similar to that of a mushroom…

& maybe I am just an insane painter. But I am confident in what I say and believe.

AND. I believe that society is handling reality the wrong way.

AND.

maybe one day my paintings can speak for themselves, globally.

If you’ve got to the end of this blog post, thank you.

Thank you for allowing a new, yet crazy, perception of mental illness to embed in your subconscious.

Mental illness doesn’t have to exist. Ignorance to our Soul’s calling, however, does exist.

With much love,

Pamela

Hello!

I haven’t posted a blog post in quite a long time….

and that’s because my spiritual journey has been kicking my butt! x1000

I went back to Mexico in January, starting my new year painting in a foreign country and meditating in the jungle.

Watching hundreds of tiny white butterflies fly in circles at 9am and afraid at 2am because there’s a tarantula in my room.

There’s something about being alone…

with my thoughts, but feeling entirely whole with nature.

It’s feeling free.

Free like the butterflies.. is what I crave.

Putting your backpack on and leaving your home, alone, is exhilarating. There is something remarkable that happens when you go beyond your fear of being alone and take a flight by yourself, with no one to lean back on.

On top of that, six of my paintings now live in the jungle!

and since January, it’s been non-stop healing.

Healing mentally, spiritually, emotionally, and physically.

My healing has been VERY rough for me because all of sudden, BOOOM! my face started breaking out with acne, acne and more acne!

I am starting to believe that maybe I’ve induced further acne to pop up because of my anxiety around a few zits on my face. Or maybe because I tried a bunch of different products on my face at the same time… or it could be my body is just detoxifying from all the trauma hidden deep within my cells.

Whatever it is, it has caused me to fully awaken to how beautiful I actually am.

Yes, I am still figuring out why I’m breaking out, and yes, I do have scars that won’t go away anytime soon…. (and maybe sooner than later if I visualize they’re already gone)

BUT, the scars are a reminder – a reminder for my soul to learn how to Love itself.

Yes, sometimes, I feel so insecure when I look in the mirror, but it’s all about self-talk.

Self-talk to see past my current reality and to a reality I desire.

It’s not about being ungrateful on where you currently are, but knowing you want something different.

So, when I look in the mirror, yes, I see bacteria filled pimples and scars, and my skin not being its healthiest.

But, what if it is at its healthiest? What if purging is the best part? What if there is Light waiting for me? Waiting for me wake up and stop obsessing about what my skin looks like.. what if my awareness is the Light?

& of course this all relates to the concept I am focusing on within my artwork because what I’ve come to realize is I am a Healer.

In order for me to heal anyone or for my paintings to be enjoyed by anyone else, I need to heal myself. From the inside and outside.

and healing from the inside, is F***ING HARD.

Acne is teaching me the important lesson of letting go of anxiety. Acne is healing from the inside.

Without letting go of anxiety and ignoring the obsession I have with how my face looks, I can’t enjoy clear skin.

It’s as simple as that and yet extremely difficult to just... stop thinking.

Anxiety about ANYTHING your mind decides to obsess over doesn’t have to be permanent. You don’t have to ingest anxiety pills for 30 years because believe it or not, that’s the easy way to cure anxiety.

Curing anxiety, is letting it flow within you. Feeling it. Watching it. and then letting it go.

My journey is kicking my butt, however, my journey is allowing me to learn from my thoughts and the power of my mind. So, in the long run, I will have clear beautiful skin.

As a matter of fact, I actually have clear beautiful skin RIGHT NOW.

My journey will flourish within my paintings.

My journey will help me become a successful artist!

because, all I really want in this life, is to share my journey, my growth and my passion.

All the best,

Pamela

Hello Fellow Creative!

While painting the second part of my new series Jungle Mind, I came to many realizations about how my work is evolving and my process as a painter.

First and foremost, I paint based on my experiences!

Meaning, I try to be in the present moment at all times and absorb my surroundings as much as possible!

As if I am a human sponge 🙂 x 

For example…

While in Palenque, Mexico, I meditated in front of gigantic gorgeous jungle trees – I observed every physical aspect of them, and inhaled the energy they shot out.

So, when I am in the studio painting or making any type of work;

I put myself back in the moment of complete analyzation and that’s what when I get in the zone!

It’s almost like using a photographic memory or muscle memory to create a composition and mix irresistible colors. 

With that said, as I meditate on my most recent work;

I see fragments of reality and paint moving swiftly as if the paint itself has anxiety, running and trying to get somewhere… an infinite escape from yourself where there is no end point.

Is this how it feels when your mind suddenly gets taken over by a mental illness? Or is this what happens when you wake up one day feeling more in tune with your spirituality?

I myself don’t suffer with a severe mental illness, aside from being very anxious.

& my Hot Yoga practice allows me to heal my anxious thoughts when they reappear… which is my own spiritual journey.

However, I have witnessed others very close to me who are mentally unstable and are stuck.

This DOES NOT mean the person is crazy.

It just means that the person keeps running from their mind, not realizing that the key to a higher consciousness is to just BE and sit through your untamed mind.

When you feel like you’ve lost touch with reality, it means that a spiritual awakening is happening and it’s something you have to dig through.

It doesn’t come easy.

You have to BREAK apart your mind to build it back up, as I mentioned in my previous blog post.

I also mentioned that I’ve taken LSD multiple times. Resulting the huge installation I did for my BFA thesis.

LSD allowed me to see my surroundings with more clarity..

BUT, mushrooms allowed me to DIG into my spirituality. Something I am eternally grateful for. When taking psychedelics, it is all about mind control. 

I’ve had a pretty bad trip while taking them in Austin, Texas. & then I realized it was over and it was only a temporary feeling.

WHICH IS ALL OF LIFE. A TEMPORARY FEELING.

I didn’t hallucinate demons and the floor wasn’t melting. I was only extremely suicidal and it was terrifying.

HOWEVER, it was something I had to get over in my mind. It was a feeling I always had as a teenager that I couldn’t escape. After my sister passed away it felt like my childhood fell apart and I grew up feeling very alone.

So, when I did shrooms in the Jungle (about a month after my trip in Austin), I no longer felt mentally blocked, and it almost felt like all of sudden,

my mind finally felt calm…

I was finally able to breathe in the Now, and just be one with the Universal energy.

Nonetheless, not everyone can have a so called “bad” trip and just keep moving forward.

& not everyone can peel their mind apart without going through a psychosis.

I am NOT saying that I was perfect throughout the process of peeling my mental blocks away.

I will say it again, IT IS NOT AN EASY PROCESS. But it is totally worth it!

& I have seen the opposite reaction with psychedelics and spirituality… Where the ego gets in the way and someone you thought was mentally strong, gets defeated by their spiritual awakening

or doesn’t know how to handle it.

Spirituality doesn’t evolve because you want it to. It evolves spontaneously and most of the time, you’re like HOLY FUCK, what is happening to me?

Like really?

& if you are still attached to the “I,” then you are not only spiritually trapped in your own mind but you sound crazy to the people around you.

You feel powerful, almost as if you are God himself.

Missing the whole point of what a spiritual awakening is all about.

When you have a higher consciousness, you now have the responsibility of caring for others more than yourself.

In Buddhist philosophy, this is called Nirvana.

Or the process of being an enlightened being and showing compassion to ALL sentient beings and not only trying to better yourself.

Yes, you do have a Godlike consciousness…

BUT, not God in terms of Western Ideology.

“God” in terms of being one with the Universal energy. We are ALL just energy. And if you vibrate on a higher frequency, it doesn’t mean you are more powerful.

It means YOU ARE NOW capable of healing others.

AND, this is where my interest in mental illness and spirituality comes into play.

We, as a society need to STOP being afraid of being spiritually attuned just because there is a stigma that hippies are drug addicts, dropouts and clinically insane.

DO NOT get me wrong, I am not a psychedelic promoter and it is 100% possible to become spiritually awakened without the help of psychedelics.

What I am advocating for, is if psychedelics are known to induce mental illness in Western society,

then why are psychedelics a part of the spiritual journey in countries outside of the U.S.?

When taking LSD or shrooms for the sole purpose of understanding your higher self,  you begin to understand why cultures who are surrounded by nature are more spiritually awakened. 

Then what is mental illness exactly?

& why is psychedelics a Schedule I drug?

What is our society hiding and taking away from us?

We are ALL spiritual beings, whether or not you are aware of it.

& I’ve noticed that the more spiritual you are, the more sensitive you are to the vibrations and energies of other people.

We belong with Nature and diagnosing someone with a mental illness is a way for society to spiritually trap us and keep us in that state of confusion and disorganization.

BECAUSE, once you get past that thin line of either being spiritually awakened or dead shit crazy, no one can interfere with your higher self.

Instead of us locking up people in asylums, we should offer people who are mentally lost spiritual retreats surrounded by Nature.

& I am sure our society will be much different if we turn mental hospitals into a place where you can spiritually heal yourself!!!

x

Thank you for reading this weeks blog post!

You can see the painting, Jungle Mind: Part 2 on my Instagram.

The more you observe my paintings, the more you can feel the energy of my thoughts within them.

My paintings ARE the mind itself.

Transitioning, hallucinating, and becoming!  

Yours Truly,

Pamela

Hello Fellow Creative!

Last time we left off with an introduction to what I will be blogging about.

My intention is to get comfortable with the flow of writing and process the fleeting thoughts that pass through my mind while making work.

With this, I intend to hopefully write a book about my philosophies on mental illness!

With that said, let’s start…

🙂

I recently graduated college with my BFA and for my thesis, I explored the relationship between the way a flower blossoms to the way mental illness takes over one’s mind.

Can you visualize a flower slowly growing from a seed, and then as time passes, each petal drying and falling individually?

Below is an excerpt I wrote about the final installation I produced. So you can get an insight on how my current work has evolved.

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Irina

 It was a Sunday afternoon, November 4^th 2007. My mother was sleeping, after a long weekend of not being a mother and indulging in her selfish needs. I waited for Irina all weekend because she promised me she was going to pick me up on Saturday, but never showed up. I assumed she decided to get high and forgot about me. When I heard a heavy knock on the door, I immediately thought, “she came,” and scurried to the door. When I opened the door, I saw my sister Diana sternly telling me to get dressed. I asked her why in frustration but she simply repeated herself with grief. As I was looking through the closet for something to wear, I overheard Diana waking up my mother and saying, “your daughter is dead.” That was the moment I found out Irina overdosed and I was never going to see my sister again.

 I was only 11, but I knew Irina couldn’t handle her emotions. She suffered from bipolar disorder and I experienced a lot of her maniac and depressive episodes. I saw her high off everything you can think of, from heroine to painkillers. When I found out she finally overdosed, it suffocated my understanding of who I was and changed the way I adapted as an adolescence. My emotions felt too intense to handle and I no longer felt like I was a part of a family. Culturally, we are taught not to show our weaknesses so, as a teenager, I thought about suicide constantly. I couldn’t tell my friends or my therapists about what was actually happening inside of my mind and letting go of my sister took years before I finally felt like her death changed my life positively. After 10 years of analyzing and endlessly tormenting myself with anxious thoughts, I realized I needed to make artwork that embodied her spiritual essence, thanks to my first acid trip.

I tried LSD for the first time during Summer of 2017. Taking LSD influenced my visual understanding dramatically because of how heightened my senses became. My senses felt sensitive and in return my visual experience with painting became a lot more vulnerable. I started experimenting with LSD to further my understanding of what it means to be a painter both emotionally and physically. Naturally, I yearned to immerse and surround myself in nature in order to experience LSD to its fullest potential. So, observing flowers and the way they move with the wind, as if each petal was individually breathing allowed me to be aware of exactly what I wanted in my work; a seductive world for the viewer to mentally step into that is intense yet empathetic at the same time. Subconsciously, I knew my thesis work needed to be about mental illness when I saw a bunch of dead flowers alongside the living breathing ones. It reminded me of Irina and how her brain must’ve fell apart when bipolar took over her intuition.

I wrote this for my creative writing class one semester; our assignment was to write about a memory poetically under 200 words, forcing me to rethink how I actually felt.

“I first sensed my brain tingling. My thoughts were intensified. All noise became euphoric and precipitation took over my body. My soul became nature and my physical presence followed. My feet demanded to walk and as I stumbled along under the beaming sun, I experienced the life of a flower. Their emotions were spilling out. I smelled their elegance and watched them breath the air in, and then out. I soon remembered I was at the highline. With other humans watching. But. I was on LSD.”

 After my first acid trip, I physically knew I broke the boundaries of social norms. LSD (lysergic acid diethylamide) is a Scheduled I drug, alongside marijuana, meaning it “does not” have any medical benefits whatsoever. However, from my personal adventures with the drug, it enlightened me rather than harmed me and helped me understand how important the tangible moment is. Approximately 45 minutes after I ingested acid, the back of my brain felt extreme pressure, as if it was going to explode. I am convinced that this was the process of my intuition opening up, becoming clearer and more sensitive to subtleties. People usually don’t pay attention to small details on a daily basis and with my senses on full awareness, it all connected to me. I crave to make my artwork into a stimulating experience by meticulously adding the smallest details possible in every inch of my work and keeping the viewer’s attention for as long as possible.

Immediately the next day, I had an urgent feeling that I had to materialize what I’ve learned about awareness through making sketches. I started creating abstract ink drawings of flowers and simultaneously asking myself, “How does losing one’s mind to mental illness relate to the way flowers blossom and then fall apart petal by petal and die?” I spent about two months thinking about this question before I started making paintings. My original idea was to create a tight room where people can walk in. I wanted to create the walls by attaching 18×24 inch oil paintings to one another and construct a roof like structure with blankets of crochet. I envisioned my work to be that way until I finished about 12 paintings and needed to start attaching them. I started struggling with where I wanted to go with my work when I saw that the paintings as a wall alone weren’t enough for the amount of impact I wanted. I wanted to overwhelm the viewer and represent the unwanted feelings of anxiety that mental illness produces. I decided that the paintings needed to stand on their own after attaching them, so I used Plexiglas as a structure for the paintings to lean on for support. By doing so, the paintings transformed into objects and symbolize the mind going through transition. The objects fall slightly forward, bending the Plexiglas and creating an impression that the yarn is pulling the objects towards the ground. This creates tension in negative space and relates to the struggle for balance in the mind. More importantly, turning my paintings into objects meant that I started relying on my physical body to produce work rather than only using logic to pick up a paint brush or palette knife and decide what my composition should be. This meant LSD didn’t only open up my mind, but helped me recognize that ultimately the body has full control and its our responsibility to develop an understanding about relationship between the body and the mind. Touch and my hands feeling the materials is a vital component in making the tactility of the work. Our minds register tactility with all of our five senses, and so I experimented with various materials i.e. latex, resin, yarn, sharpie, and beeswax in order to produce a successful sensual experience for my audience.

In addition, the wooden pallets I’ve found in the trash are painted with iridescent gold and a cool off-white to uplift the objects to eye level and compliment the harmonious color palette of warm hues that travel throughout the installation. The pallets give an organizational quality to the objects and mirror the rectangular structure of the clay boards and the sheets of latex that are vigorously sewn together. Yet, I disturb the balance of the pallets by tilting them while they’re hanging in space and conveying the illusion that yarn is spilling out of the suspended pallets and onto the floor. Is the yarn tugging the pallets down or are the pallets throwing up the yarn? – are questions that I myself want to keep ambiguous. The motif of the rectangular shape represents the rigid mind while the motif of obsessiveness and loss of control is shown through the strings of yarn breaking the organized shape of the rectangle. The repetitive act of drawing short small lines with sharpie unify the large body of work and depict a sense of OCD and neurotic state of mind. The movement of lines that resemble the complex motion of the brain are seen with a variety of materials from soft strings of yarn to very thick oil paint stroked with a palette knife. Within the objects, I create multiple layers with transparent resin for the viewer to psychologically step inside of the work. Resembling when a mentally ill person is stuck in a self-destructive mindset and feels trapped inside of a warped reality. I pour resin over living flowers and engulf them into a preserved world. This process takes away the breath of the flowers, similar to the concept of dying. I leave the damaged brushes I use for resin on the surface of the objects to indicate that someone has left work and will return. The use of both small and large sheets of Plexiglas corresponds to the transparency and feel of resin.

I use beeswax to oppose translucency and to make the work tactile and dense. One of the crocheted piece’s is emerged within latex, wax and resin and appears as if its disintegrating. My intention is for the viewer to feel the heaviness of the piece as it hangs with weight over one of the tilting pallets, similar to the dragging feeling of depression and falling apart. Long strings of yarn hang delicately from the heavy crocheted blanket and onto to the soft crocheted pieces that rest on the floor. Not only does the act of using yarn obsessively relate to anxious and uneasy feelings; it brings a gentle quality to the work. By putting piles of wax onto the soft material and hanging it as if there is someone beneath, the yarn looses the caring quality and becomes into an animal like form; another state of being opposite from rationality. In conjunction with the sensibility of beeswax, it is an important material in my culture because of its aromatic smell. When entering a Bulgarian church, the smell of beeswax candles takes over all of your other senses and is part of the spiritual experience. The color gold is an additional element that comes from my culture because both the interior and exterior of churches in Bulgaria are covered with real gold. The gold acts as a source of light when seen next to another color and is a subtle yet impactful color. At first, I wasn’t aware that using beeswax and the color gold came from my Bulgarian roots, rather it happened subconsciously throughout the process of making this work and opening my senses with LSD. However, the concept of spiritually and surpassing human existence while inside a church relates to my sister’s death and her breath moving past physical space.

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If you’re still reading, thank you!

🙂

NOW let’s get to business.

I am interested in taking the foundation of my original thesis to create a body of work that explores the relationship between spirituality and mental illness a lot MORE further than what I once did.

With the first painting of my new series, Jungle Mind: Part 1, I included the psychedelic experiences I had in Palenque, Mexico. *inserts your favorite flower emoji*

The vibrations of the colors blowing through the jungle trees and all my sensations tingling inside; building my mind layer by layer… and

soaking in the energy of Mother Nature as time no longer concerned me.

Fully connecting my consciousness with the Universe.

This is the core element element of my work!

Multiple layers constructing the conscious mind. Adding and subtracting layers as I do with my paintings.

It’s ALL a process really. Both painting and getting to know your mind.

I am not interested in the subconscious because once you’ve explored your subconscious, you should take it into reality and allow what you’ve learned to evolve your spiritual awakened consciousness!

My paintings are references to the the complexity of the mind when it is surpassing the constraints of the subconsciousness.

I PERSONALLY believe that there is a thin line between a spiritual awakening and a psychotic experience. & I believe that you find yourself through that thin line.

How?

By breaking apart your mind and building it back up!

The thing is…

not everyone can build themselves back up.

Especially with the stigma of mental illness and how scared you feel when someone has told you something is “wrong” with you.

Most often times, people feel DEFEATED by their own mind when experiencing a spiritual experience that is intense; and you might feel like you’ve lost touch with reality.

When in actuality, you’ve become more in touch with yourself but just don’t know how to materialize it in today’s society.

Why is that in some cultures, spiritually in tune people are Shamans and in another culture those same spiritually awakened people are locked up in asylums?

How does our culture in America constraint spiritual awakenings? –  is one of my biggest concerns within my work.

Societal constraints lead’s people to feel like they’re lost and without hope.

This is NOT true.

I would love for my both my physical artwork and my writings to one day BE that guide for the people who experience spiritual awakenings, but need guidance.

In the meantime, I am still developing the words to express my tangling thoughts by painting my butt off in the studio!

So, I hope you stay tuned for the evolution of my life’s work.

*You can see the painting, Jungle Mind: Part 1 on my Instagram.*

Yours truly,

Pamela

 

 

 

I’ve been thinking about starting a blog for months now, but have gotten stuck because I’ve always felt like, “OMG, it has to be perfect! and what do I even write about…there’s too many ideas inside my head.”

When it’s basically just a conversation. Between me and the reader, which is you.

Think of my blog posts as a conversation between me and you happening in two different realities.

A conversation about my thought process and a glimpse of my mind racing when I’m in my studio… almost as if you are here with me.

Now, I am sure what I just said sounds super hippie and almost insane. Well….

THAT’S MY ART!

The concept I am exploring within my artwork is about the relationship between mental illness and spirituality.

What is mental illness really? And how does mental illness relate to spiritual awakenings?

Oh! and let’s not forget how does mental illness and spirituality relate to taking psychedelics? I’m sure anyone who knows Alan Watts, knows that psychedelics played a big role in spirituality during the hippie movement *inserts peace fingers.*

In my upcoming blog posts, I will share my own experiences with psychedelics, traveling in Mexico for two months, and the evolution of my thesis work, (titled “Installation” on the menu bar).

ALL relating to my understanding of what mental illness actually is.

Ultimately, my blog posts are my rambling thoughts when I need a break from painting or simply when I’m waiting for resin to dry.

Stay tuned.

🙂 x