Averyl Ritchie is a wonderful artists I met in a CFS/ME group.

Her Corrupted Collection goes through the different stages of how she has experienced CFS/ME and it is a very beautiful depiction of what I think many of us have gone through.

Longing For The Girl She Used to Be

This is the first painting the artist painted to express her pain. This dancer is grieving. She has lost her identity. She no longer can live her passion of dancing, and sits alone, sad and rejected.

Freedom from Corruption

With Chronic Fatigue you have some good days between the many bad. The dancer is free and everywhere she goes, flowers fall from her hair, leaving a rainbow of colour behind. Before working on her maintenance and progression to health, on a good day, she would forget my  limitations and do everything I once used to do. She knew they were very few and far between, so she made the most of them. Not realising that it would cause her to crash because she has done too much

Hindered Spirit

Many of her paintings are of dancers. It is one of her great passions and the emotions they convey, depict exactly how she feels at times. Hindered Spirit is the main dancer being held back by a backdrop of dancers. Often times, her body holds me back from doing even the simplest of things even though she has the greatest ambitions to do bigger things.

Melancholia

On a bad day, it can feel like the earth is dragging you into it and the sky in falling down on you. The body is so heavy and no matter how hard you try, you can’t do what you want to. Melancholia is an effect of Chronic Illness.

Broken

Sometimes she feels so brittle, that if you took her arm, you could snap it in two quite easily. This painting came to her during a particularly bad migraine that lasted many days. She saw herself as broken. A fragile woman, that would never live a normal life again.

Entrapment

This is exactly how it feels to live with chronic illness. Trapped. A prisoner in your own body. She would see the world around her, but couldn’t go out into it and enjoy it. The bird on the top left is free, but I am not.

Innocence

Averyl works with a lot of people that have been abused at some point in their life. They hide their secret for many years behind a mask, unaware of the affects it has later in life. The little girl is in the woods, burying her secret, hoping to forget it ever happened.

 

Copies of all of her pieces are available to be shipped worldwide at www.averylsritchie.com

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If you liked this post you might enjoy:

• The Corrupted – A collection describing the different stages experienced with CFS (Part 2)- Coming soon
• Behind Perception (Part 1)- An exhibition challenging the perception of CFS/ME
• How are you? The not so simple answer to that simple question
• Best random find of my life- Intro to Toby Morrison Golden Rules for CFS

Or for a full catalogue of my CFS/ME related posts check out my CFS/ME Index