After suffering a mental breakdown and being put on “suicide watch”, Hampstead artist and poet John-Paul Flintoff found solace in his art.
The former Sunday Times journalist said that a series of traumatic events in 2015 triggered his breakdown years later, which led him to checking into psychiatric hospital.
Mr Flintoff explained he began to feel powerless and described himself as a “zombie” after facing two deaths in two months, and then two other loved ones having major health scares.
He said: “It totally destroyed my confidence in 'am I alright, is the world safe?' I lost my work, I got in debt. It genuinely got worse and worse.
“It took about three years for me to recognise it. By the end of 2017 I was wishing I wasn’t alive, but I wasn’t going to do anything about it, so it felt like a terrible trap.
“I did really think everyone would be better off without me, so it was a dark place.”
Despite going through an “awful time” over eight weeks at the hospital, the Hampstead resident said that he “wouldn’t wish it away”.
From there he had to rebuild himself. Still buried in debt and without work, he would work himself up to little achievements such as going to the pharmacy, which felt like major milestones
Prior to his writing career, Mr Flintoff saw art as just a hobby. But his psychiatrist encouraged him to keep drawing, allowing him to express himself in a different medium.
Mr Flintoff said: “I substantially made progress in my recovery by drawing instead of writing. So I drew pictures of myself in situations of what I was imagining doing to myself – to show myself how brutal it could be sometimes.”
This illustrated “two versions” of himself, one where he could look at his saddening artwork and distance himself from his dark thoughts.
During his recovery process, he was also recommended to walk home and digest what he was thinking. From there he found sanctuary at the Holy Trinity church in Sloane Square, Chelsea.
Although Mr Flintoff says he was not brought up to be religious, he found it restful to sit at the church and enjoy its free shelter.
He said: “I was kind of persecuted by my own self-critical thoughts, so I found it quite helpful to recite the prayers over and over just to shut my brain up. So that helped.”
He was often in awe of the church's colourful stained-glass windows and his drawings began to draw inspiration from the church.
The raw emotion of his artwork began to also captivate others, to the point that he was asked to make 37 portraits of members of his church parish.
At this point he began to turn his therapeutic tools of walking and art into ways to please others. When his moments of peace in church were stripped away during the Covid-19 lockdown, he hosted online “pilgrimages” across London using Google Street View.
Online audiences could watch him clicking past blurred out faces and number plates to show the capital’s inner beauty as he travelled virtually from north London to Canterbury. During these 'pilgrimages' he would take screenshots and draw biblical scenes onto the images of modern Britain.
Unlike his trauma-based artwork in the past, the doodles in Street View took humorous biblical adaptations of modern London – from a plague of flies in West Hampstead to Abraham about to sacrifice Isaac outside a north London dry cleaner.
A series of virtual pilgrimages are still taking place, where participants will be able to draw collaboratively with John-Paul using Aggie.io. An upcoming session is on Thursday (November 3) at 7pm at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T3C3N3s7tOY&feature=youtu.be
Psalms for The City, a book of illustrated poems inspired by the Luttrell Psalter, has now been published by Mr Flintoff, describing how he found peace in a city of chaos.
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