This one is personal.
Its just a quick ink sketch I did in my car, listening to DIO’s, ‘Holy Diver’ before work the other day.
It seemed like a small thing. Just playing with an idea from an album cover that I have always liked artistically.
Its one that caused me a lot of suffering.
A lot of formative suffering.
Like a lot of early teen kids, I found music and art to be a great place to put my angst.
One of my favorites was this album.
Everything about it.
I still enjoy it start to finish today. (I think we all have 5-6 records from our youth like this. This is a big one for me.)
So much like the morning I sketched this, I used to draw variations of this album cover incessantly.
Naturally, I worked several versions of the demon on the cover into a dozen or so art assignments at school.
The pictured Miss Tyler, who was some kind of fundamentalist whack-a-doodle and was a huge proponent of the Satanic Panic. This would have been 1984-1985 and the nation was living in fear of Dungeons and Dragons, Heavy Metal, and LSD because apparently in every third city some rando kid took 1000 mics, played a wizard and got to thinking they could fly?
Seriously, this is the bullshit our childhoods were ruled by pre-internet.
Anyway, this evil witch decided that instead of doing her job, which was to teach me art… she decided that instead it would be better to package my assignments up and mail them to my mother along with a scary letter that must have made my mother think I was going to suck a goat off in the woods that very night to sell my soul…
because when I got home from school I had no posters. I had no music. All of my art was gone.
This began a period of abuse and isolation that I am just now starting to untangle.
I will do this piece properly now that I have sketched it and I know how important it is to me.
The world deserves to know what this particular demon did.
