Thread by @owenbroadcast

alright, this will be kind of a long-ish thread so if youre not into it just keep scrolling its all good. otherwise, people often ask me to explain my images and talk about the symbolism or whats going on “behind” them, normally i dont really do this. [...]

part of the reason why i like making images is that they stand on their own and, especially online, have whatever context the viewer is bringing to them. ill explain and discuss symbolism but usually dont go in depth in terms of how something i made relates to me personally

but i just wrapped up something that i guess you could say i put more of myself into than normal, and, in a way i kind of feel like doing this image closed this chapter of my life that ive been stuck in for a minute

so, since i think it will enhance looking at the image, might be interesting to you (or not, thats cool too), and will allow me to tell a story one time that i havent really ever gone into on here and then never talk about it again (presumably), lets do it.

so, basically (this isnt a political thing) 2016 came at a super interesting time for me because the few years earlier, i had gone deeper into “conspiracy stuff” and figuring out what i thought about things independent of the worldview id just been given

id always been “that guy” obviously but i had started looking into the specifics of things, certain historical events, things the government says, cliche things like how bankers manipulate things, and was surprised at how much concrete information i was finding.

im sure most of you know that feeling. its one thing when its like “well everyone knows rich people control things” but its another thing when youre looking right at these black and white facts and figures that everyone is telling you dont exist or are just pure craziness.

so, i was looking at all this stuff and, was kind of feeling a mix of excited and confused by it. i had a really big circle of friends who all presented as punks or free thinkers or, things like that, and i wanted to see what other people thought about this stuff.

much to my surprise, all these people around me had really strange reactions to all this. dont get me wrong, im not like, at the bar asking people to look at some chart about the fed, im just talking with my close friends in completely appropriate ways about what im reading

and im getting the weirdest reactions, like people getting angry, or acting like im stupid just for looking in to something. i hadnt even drawn any conclusions or gone that far in to anything “crazy” and i was getting these huge walls and ... strange vibes from everyone

so i kind of wrote it off, you know whatever im still tight with all these people, we go to parties, play music and stuff, but slowly i noticed that peoples perception of me, even guys i had known for years, started to change and take on a life of its own, way beyond my control

like all of a sudden i couldnt bring up anything, even like totally normal topics, without people putting it through this lens of it being some crazy theory or something. even like my best friends. it was really weird and i had no idea what to think about it, to be honest.

so 2015 politics stuff comes along and, honestly i had all this stuff where i really had no idea what to think, and i reached out to my friends to touch base with them and to see what they were thinking. this just made things way way worse.

im sure you’re reading this and imagining me like, hitting them with hardcore crazy off the rails stuff that you shouldn’t bring up in normal convos, but it really wasn’t like that at all. i didn’t even know who i was going to vote for at first. i just wanted to talk

and again i was getting the strangest hostile reactions from people just for... actually wanting to know what they thought about things, topics i myself hadn’t even made up my mind on yet. i literally laid awake at night wondering what i was doing wrong but came up with nothing

i remember I was talking with some people and, I said I wasn’t sure who I was going to vote for, and everyone went insane. they were all yelling at me and I’m just like... yo im telling you I have no opinion. how are you going to get mad at me for that?

obviously it all got way worse when i decided to vote for trump and told a few close friends. i very naively thought people would just be cool with it. like we hang out every day and ive know you for years, arent we closer than this? apparently... not

so now it was like the whole situation got pushed over the edge. on top of this, when it was all at its peak, i moved like 40 minutes further away so now it was like an effort to see people, which I was down to make, but i basically had all my social connections severed

it really wasnt just a politics thing. like i had a friend i knew for ten years who i would have asked to be the best man at my wedding who [literally] stopped talking to me after we were at a party and he heard me say i thought some nasa stuff was fake. we never spoke again

everyone was hitting me with crazy behavior like this. and i thought about it so much like... what did i do wrong? i ran every situation over and over in my mind so many times and just came up with nothing. id been nothing but a great friend to everyone. it was maddening.

on top of all this i kept running these hypotheticals in my brain and flipping the situation, like, well if i had a friend that thought something i thought was wrong or stupid, i wouldn’t stop talking to them...? i thought about it all the time for so long.

and it was brutal man. like i was in a band and they stop hitting me up, so id contact the singer, one of my best friends, and he’d give me the run around, and then later id see on facebook that theyre playing a show... without me. damn

so now i basically had no friends in the city and on top of this whenever someone would poke back into the sphere i could tell people had taken on this insane stance against me. for example (there is a point to all this):

a friend of a friend was playing a show with this guy craig. craig was like, friend of a friend to me, so i told him, hey man thats funny i know craig, you should tell him u both know me. + this guy craig tells this guy “yeah i don’t talk to owen anymore, hes a white supremacist”

ive literally never talked to craig about politics once in my entire life, and all my memories of this dude are of me going out of my way to help him, and then hes telling random people im a white supremacist (obviously false). it was total madness

just to wrap up this part of the story, it was even more maddening because all these guys knew that at this time i was hardcore into tibetan buddhism. so im like, dude youve seen me wake up at 6am to meet tiny central asian dudes to their wisdom, what are you talking about?

so now i had no one in the city i hungout with and the only friends i had were at my job. im cool not bringing politics into work obviously but everyone at this job, imagine like an office money numbers situation, was the maximum level of on hardcore social justice x 1000

im talking like, i heard about how bad white men were every single day. people casually talked about “agender representation”. im talking that level. im just there to fill a spreadsheet and chill and theyre going hard on this stuff 24/7

so i had to put this huge mask on every time i went to work and pretend to be someone completely different and, basically deal with people talking shit about me to my face all the time every day, and, I needed the job, so, i kind of just rolled with it

I was really depressed so, I probably wouldn’t do that now but, it was just easier honestly. and then when I’d go home I’d get the same thing from my family. they’d be like “wow people who think this are crazy”, and when id tell them i thought that, it just... wouldn’t click

when people were going off about people with views that I had, I’d politely say something like “haha hey yeah I actually think that, you’re talking about me”, and they just wouldn’t get it. everyone was like this all the time.

so I’d be in situations like, “wow I can’t wait to see my cousin I haven’t seen in 5 years this is great”, and then the whole time we’re together he’s just unknowingly talking shit about me to my face because he can’t understand that I’m not a hyperliberal just like him

so that was my life and I kind of got used to wearing this mask 24/7 and having these people I cared about lash out at me all the time and, having to write it off as them being ignorant or... whatever. i lived in a shitty apartment far from my job at this time

so, i didn’t really the effect this was really having on me, and didn’t realize i was turning to alcohol and smoking weed excessively to cope with all this psychic trauma. i was smoking the maximum amount 24/7 and drinking all the time.

id wake up, smoke on the way to work, smoke during my break, smoke before the train home, usually drink on the hour plus train ride home, and then just do nothing at night. id always smoked a lot but now it was a ton. the drinking kind of slowly dialed up then grew exponentially

i was also living with my gf at this time and, one thing about being addicted to stuff is that it feels good and normal to be in denial about it. so when someone tries to help you, you just view them as an obstacle to you being comfortably ill. this is very common actually

so, i was fighting with my girlfriend a lot, mostly because i was refusing to do anything about my situation and she would try and do something about it or help me and id just lash out at her. this was probably one of the worst times of my life in retrospect.

so, thanks for bearing with the set up now we can get a little action going. she goes away on a trip for like 3 weeks and, i guess i felt like i was finally free to do what i wanted so, i went really nuts and was drinking a truly inhuman amount all the time, smoking, etc.

i wake up after like 2 and half weeks of this and im in my bathroom and im looking at my eyes like: what the fuck my eyes look not totally white, are they like.. off white? are my eyes like, yellow or something? shining my phones light into my eyes in this tiny bathroom apartment

and I can’t really tell if im imagining it or if theyre yellow so, i wrote it off like man im just high or something it’s fine, the light in here is kind of yellow whatever, and the next few days went back and forth between thinking something was up vs thinking I was imagining it

finally I realize im not imagining it and go to this doctor. she’s pretty chill about it, she says, yeah maybe they are but i cant really tell, maybe not, we’ll get this blood test done and I’ll contact you in 5-7 days, all good. i leave, my gf comes home that night, thats it

the next day im in the supermarket and i get this call. its the doctor. first off im thinking... why are you calling me its only been a day... and she says i have to go to the ER. now. “right now?” yeah right now. go to the hospital.

so im in this russian supermarket looking at pasta getting this phonecall, so i checked out, went home, and took an Uber to the hospital. my girlfriend came with me, this surprised me at the time, guess I was in a weird headspace.

get to the hospital, they take me into the ER, do some tests, and this doctor comes in to my “room”, really im just behind this curtain wearing some robe, and he’s talking to us, and I remember this moment so perfectly

the doctor turns to my girlfriend and says “well, he has jaundice. obviously. you can see it, look at him, his skin and eyes are all yellow”. and I was under these bright white hospital lights looking at my arms and im like, fuck hes totally right, they had this yellow hue

so I’m thinking, alright, im gonna die. i literally actually thought I was going to die full on. I’m thinking this is it, i fucked up something in my body permanently and im gonna die in this hospital.

in my mind im waiting for them to tell me they need to do some emergency surgery or something, i get wheeled out, and I’m gonna die. im thinking, “wow this is how I die this is so fucking stupid and lame”, freaking out. it was really intense.

but all they did was run some more tests on my, basically checking for anything that was going to kill me immediately, they didnt find anything, and they sent me home.

the next year of my life was basically me seeing different doctors, none of them knowing what was up [...]

and the whole time im thinking that im going to die. i thought about myself dying every single day probably every hour for months and months. i also thought I did it to myself which just made it way worse. i truly thought i accidentally killed myself in slow motion, basically.

little spoiler alert: actually, all this had happened because I have this rare genetic thing with my bile ducts and, actually, its good that all this happened because now I know I have it and can do something about it. weird how these things play out huh.

but I didn’t learn that for like a year and a half so, me in the story really thought i had killed myself. im going to doctors, they’re running tests, my numbers are really bad and not changing for months and months. seemed like it wasn’t improving

so my life was insane. everywhere i went and everything i did I was always thinking about it. id be at a party and be like haha well its cool im here but im dying. it was really all i thought about. won’t go into it but there were other symptoms that just reinforced this.

at some point after the initial incident, I was in my room, and I prayed for real for the first time. i got down on my knees and i asked god to help me and told him that obviously i had really trashed my life for no reason because im a total idiot.

that was basically the big turning point of my life. i had intuited that christianity was true but hadnt really done anything about it but me realizing that I was so stupid that i had (I thought) killed myself, it was a pretty classic like “here’s rock bottom” moment.

obviously you can tell from the story that i was always a pretty substance based person and, to make a long story short, over the next year I had everything that I was leaning on taken away from me. every little thing, like a checklist.

i couldnt drink anymore obviously but I thought, well thats fine I’ll just smoke. But then I realized I shouldn’t be smoking if I don’t know what’s up with my liver. okay well now I’ll just be really into cooking meats and stuff, like beef and pork [...]

hey guess what doctor says you can’t have that so much anymore. okay well ill just get all this cool tea... oh doctor says i can’t have that either. everything I tried it lean on was taken away from me

on top of this now that I wasn’t living under this narcotic blanket anymore I started to feel things way more deeply and to see things around me so much more clearly. i felt all this pain from lost friendships and pain from ... everything, in a totally new way

I could also see things totally differently like... hmm everyone in my family has substance abuse problems... why is that? and why did no one ever talk to me about it when i was younger? why don’t we talk about it now? it was like i had fresh eyes seeing everything new

i had realized that i had to move, that my life literally depended on it, so I saved up some cash and peaced out, moved like 1000 miles away with just my girlfriend (she knew some people here, I didn’t) and a truck full of my stuff. ngl it felt pretty bad ass.

but now i was in a totally new situation where, I thought I’d be like, transferred into a different aquariums with clean water and I’d be fine but, actually the dirty water was in my mind. and i worked from home, was alone a lot, i couldnt ignore it.

all the time, doing nothing, working, I’d be wrestling with these huge thoughts, thinking about my past, or how i didnt want to hang with people if I wasn’t drinking, and hey why is that? why am I like that? and what am i eating? is it killing me? 24/7

this threads getting kind of long so I’ll wrap it up, my point is that now that I was fully on my own it was like I was wresting more with these demons, not less. like now it was just me and them, i could see them clearly and feel them all the time.

of course I’d been praying and reading the bible and thinking about god more, by this point I fully thought of myself as christian and actually think god intervened in my life to save me from my former state. anyway, if you made it this far heres the payoff.

i was online one day and i saw this image, its kind of a famous image in art history but im not sure how well its known in the normal world. its called the temptation of saint anthony. its kind of a strange image.

this guy (st anthony) is floating in the air and all these horrific and weird demons are pulling him in every direction. supposedly its the first painting we have from michelangelo, but he copied it from a drawing, its like a theme in christian art. this is it:

so i saw this and im like, YES, wow, that's exactly how i fucking feel. it just resonated with me so perfectly. that was how i felt every second since this all happened, being pulled in every direction by all this darkness, everywhere, all the time

and i started to think about this image a lot. like id get invited somewhere, and get in this huge inner conflict like, well im not drinking, i wish i was, everyone there is drinking, why am i like this, why does it bother me so much, and that image was just a perfect view of it

and then even when i was alone, like he is, that was still how it felt, feeling all these painful parts of my past, and my childhood, and my family, and stuff id done, everything, all at once just grabbing me and trying to get me to go in all these different directions.

so eventually i sketched out some of these demons. you know its funny, i loved tibetan art (still do) for so long but never drew any of the "darker" imagery from it. at the time, i didnt know why. now i think its because i was living in a fake cloud of only positive experiences.

so i started sketching these demons, and started thinking of them as all the different things pulling at me and affecting me. at first it was just abstract but then i started to think of each one as a particular energy and a particular part of this darkness i fight with

at first it was just loose sketches, then i thought id just casually draw out the image, but it kind of snowballed. i spent a lot of time of it. more than anything ive done for myself in a long time. i felt like i was channeling a deep part of myself into the image.

obviously im going to show you in a second, but some of the demons, when i drew them, it was like i literally could feel myself breaking off a piece of my mind and putting it into the image. since i got jaundice, i rarely used the color yellow, especially not for someones eyes.

i remember drawing this demon, the one i felt like i put the most of myself into, and coloring his eyes in yellow, and how it felt. like i was really tapping into something deep that the conscious part of my mind doesnt want to engage with. i can feel it right now typing this.

so im really amped to share this image with you all. its my favorite thing ive ever made.

the temptation of saint anthony

if youre reading this as im writing it, hold on one sec, im gonna go update the other thread and put a print of this into my shop, then im gonna post a little bit about what things in the image represent. so, ill be right back.

we'll start with this one. i called this guy alcoholica. this is like the demon of alcoholism. you can see he's crying, he is immersed in pain, and he's lashing out, going to strike violently with the bottle he's holding. you can see the vine with grapes and a bag of hops.

on the bottle he's striking out with is the alchemical symbol for salt, and on the beer bottles tied to this arms you can see the glyph for saturn. these represent physicality, he's painfully physical and tied to rejecting the physical limitations that are a part of being human.

i tried to capture the insatiability of alcoholism in this demon. like even you when you drink a ton its not enough and you just want to drink more and how painful that is. like what he wants is killing him but it doesnt even do anything for him anymore. the yellow eye, btw.

i called this guy rage in my mind but really he's more like primal animality, which is tied to anger and rage. he's like the animal base primitive part of the self, also anger, just blind malice, in some senses the lowest part of the brain

this one is drugs. he's trying to get into the saints head. he's wearing a mask of happiness on his forehead but really its just a mask. theres the smoke, which is ephemerality, the fleeting nature of the experience he provides and its illusory nature as well.

on his arms you can see these datura flowers. datura is a deleriant (drug) but in art its often used to representing something that has a narcotizing effect that induces sleep, he also has a moon and a skull, symbols of the hazy slumber he imparts which is like death

this one is violence. cut into pieces, wounded and seeking to wound. he's wearing a severed head as a necklace. violent urges, basically, the impulse to hurt others both literally and in non physical ways

this one is depression. i wanted to show him torn apart and falling apart with these huge deep wounds that fully penetrate his body. u can see his bones and completely into him. he's also chained up with these gold chains, sometimes we glamorize the things that make us depressed

i gave him these gold chains and made the mask on his thigh gold because i felt like when i was really depressed about all this stuff i almost internally viewed it as a badge of honor, like it somehow was something noble or positive, i guess this is a coping mechanism.

this one is lust. as i gained clarity i found there was no vice that wouldnt occasionally surface to make itself known. i gave her sexual aspects but also certain disturbing aspects, like when you find something alluring while aroused and then later are disgusted by it.

i gave the second face she has a small grey beard, this represents the fact that contained in the flesh is the physical reality of flesh: age, disease, or even more simply dimensions of being human that u ignore while lusting after someone or something, seeing only their "charm"

this one is gluttony. like i said above i kept trying to "lean on" things, one of those things being food, and those things were gradually taken away from me. on top of that as i cleared my mind more i noticed the temptation of absurd and unhealthy food and, more generally [...]

eating purely for pleasure in a hedonistic sense, just to distract yourself or to give yourself something to do. in a more symbolic way he represents gluttony in general, which applies not just to food but to anything that can be done in excess.

this one is sloth. he's wearing this heavy iron ball and has a sleeping face in his ear. he also has this pink moon. normally i wouldnt explain this but, kind of a funny note here. when i was much much younger i heard the song pink moon by nick drake.

in case you havent heard it, it sounds like just a nice soothing song. then someone told me it was about heroin (oversimplification) and it just blew my mind, that this nice sweet sounding soft song could be about something so dark.

since then the pink moon has always represented a kind of dangerous alluring narcotizing slumber to me. i thought this was a universal symbol for a long time but turns out its just something random i picked up when i was young. i dont expect people to pick up on it when i use it

pride. he's decked out in jewels, opulent, showcasing his wealth, he's even slightly gold. there's also peacock feathers, classic symbol of pride and showing off.

this one is prelest, which, in case you're unfamiliar, is like fake spiritual energy and false spiritual confidence. he's like the allure of seemingly forbidden spiritual knowledge, the dark arts, gnosticism. in the original image there was no demon here, just a cape [...]

so i designed this one to fit that cape shaped hole, intentionally to look like the ghost of a certain mythological creature (10 points if you know). he's got the pyramid with the missing capstone, a bag of occult tools, pentagram, eye of horus, he's wearing bull heads [...]

he's also holding this dark book, meant to contrast with the lighter bible saint anthony has. this one represents my past searching for truth in, well, basically all the wrong places and the allure that those practices and disciplines have to people seeking something higher.

theres a ghost looking on, an owl hiding away (weaving spiders come not here, athena, owls is night bird, etc.), a skull all tucked away in this earthly foreground. the ghost isnt really a dead person, its more like how man can become a ghost while alive by choosing not to live.

i placed these two lights on the same level, they're contrasting each other. fire, natural light vs man made light, light in isolation (the candle in a cave) vs the light that is meant to guide others (the lighthouse), basically the juxtaposition is intentional

theres this deer in the corner. augustine talks about how the deer is like a seeker of god in that its swift and will run through the dense forest seeking water, so, he's here looking on, he's like a part of nature that represents the humble but powerful search for god

since im explaining everything which i dont normally do, i often contrast these "regular" fruit bearing trees with cypress trees, which represent death, in my landscapes. sometimes its just the duality of giving life vs death but also the fruit bearing tree is a reference to [..]

the garden of eden + mans expulsion from it. the cypress tree then represents Christs death which forms kind of a mystical and theological counterpoint to our expulsion from eden. smarter people than me have written about that, you can check it out, but, thats what it means here

i usually use the fish in my art to represent the seeker of god who lives via baptism in the water (like a fish), but also dives down deep into the unseen depths of life and the mind in a quest for truth (like the fish dives, get it. he swim).

i also usually have some architectural contrast in my image so here the city is antithetical to the castle, the castle is tradition, its safe, its strong, whereas the city is unpredictable, new, unsafe, dangerous, etc.

thats it basically except for obvious universal symbols like the moon (it changes, represents the world of changing phenomena we see around us), the rising sun, the church. usually i dont explain stuff so thought id lay it all out one time.

and thats the end. if you read all this, thats awesome. really hope you got something out of it or were at least entertained. bill watterson, artist of calvin and hobbes, said he liked doing newspaper comics because no one expects it to be real or serious [...]

so then every now and then he can pull the rug out and make something about death or something dark and people have their guard down and he can really reach them with something unexpected and real. thats kind of what i think of myself as doing here. usually i keep it light [...]

but honestly i just get so many dms, sometimes from people way younger than me, going through stuff like this, or theres just things that i wish someone told me, or i know how alone people feel sometimes dealing with stuff like this, that i like to "take it there" sometimes

also by making this image i really feel that ive closed a chapter in my life and have left this dark cocoon fully behind that hurt so much to emerge from. whats funny about cocoons is you cant go back in even if you try. i tried a few times. doesnt work. thats good, honestly

thanks for coming out