“If I wasn’t making art, I think I’d be dead or in prison,” Vincent Castiglia, told me.
For Castiglia, art began as equal parts creativity and emotion regulation. And while the same could be said for many artists, Castiglia’s work has a notable nuance – he paints exclusively in human blood.
Many people who experience intense feelings such as emptiness or loneliness cut themselves or engage in other forms of non-suicidal self-harm so that the pain and sight of their own blood focuses their attention, and provides evidence that they are “alive.” Castiglia explained how his work emerged as a way of managing and expressing emotional pain.
“It really started as a kind of distraction from my environment … I was in a really intense period right before I started using this medium – right at that time,” Castiglia explained. “And like a hemorrhage, the pressure keeps building until the vessel can’t contain it anymore, and there’s a rupture. There was a literal pain in making it, and it was communicating a pain at the same time. It was the first time an absolute personal truth was communicated.
“It was something so real that could not lie or be reproduced by any other means.”
His creative process developed into a manifestation and integration of his various experiences at a single moment in time. Castiglia uses his own blood (and sometimes the blood of his collectors) to create his art. What Castiglia experienced through his work was what he describes as a deep sense of self-awareness.
“The piece is the physical point of contact between all the energies that play in my life at a particular point in time. And it’s coming to a direct head and total focus in the form of a piece of art,” he described. “I am very literally pouring out my biological essence and my psychological essence …to see a piece of psyche that would not be accessible by any other means. So it’s almost a mystical process … because it delineates all of the places that I’ve been inside of myself, stations of experience.
“It becomes an ethereal road map.”
From Castiglia’s perspective, using his own blood is the most honest and direct form of expression both in a personal and universal sense. Specifically, while everyone has different blood, we will all die and decay.
“It couldn’t be a more personal pigment. It’s constitutionally who we are … it contains all information for replicating and maintaining life. It literally delivers life to our flesh and to our brains and powers of consciousness,” Castiglia said. “So what more perfect and personal pigment could possibly be chosen? I believe it’s transpersonal, but it’s so personal at the same time.
“I process experience into visual allegories that, I believe, are universal to all humans to some degree.”
Castiglia feels that as people confront the concepts of death and decay, they will become less fearful of the concepts, and recognize them as natural and part of the cycle of life. “It’s the balance between light and dark. It’s the balance between life and death. And if you’re living from a completely one directional place and that’s where you’re operating from, it’s not balanced,” he described. “We may be entering a time where the old model of what death means is going to be obsolete … We know that energy can’t be created or destroyed.
“The energy that we were is recycled – it’s not dead.”
Castiglia reflects this energy transfer in the title piece of his new series, “Autopsy of the Soul.” “The illustration of the title piece is a male figure on a slab. There’s fire surrounding him; He’s being opened up surgically by hands that are coming out of the fire. His essence is escaping his chest like smoke,” Castiglia explained. “And it’s being collected by this fantastic contraption that’s translating it into a liquid. And it’s being weighed against a feather – this is an ancient Egyptian concept that after death your heart is weighed against a feather. And if it’s lighter than or equal to the feather, your journey through the underworld is fortuitous.”
Over time, Castiglia has found that through the emotional processing of his art, he’s had to reassess whether the use of blood was necessary anymore, “I’m not in that place anymore. So that literal release – the pain involved – it’s not as valid today as it was when it began. I’ve had to reassess it over the last couple of years because I had to step back and say I’m not in that place any more. Do I need to work in this medium anymore? Am I married to it?” he said. “After some consideration, I realized it’s what I’m committed to. I haven’t stopped connecting with the fact that painting in this way is turning biological, genetic material into literal art.”
It’s almost a kind of biological ‘giving birth.’”
And just as he found that his art helped him, he thinks that exposure to and acceptance of concepts of death and decay can be useful to others. “There is this kind of shutting away of death and of the natural degeneration of things and it’s completely unrealistic … We’ve lost our natural appreciation for the whole process that more ancient civilizations embraced.”
“The world’s soul is kind of dead at the moment.”
