Grey Canvas is a autobiographical non-fiction that gives an inside view of a guy who lived over forty years of his life struggling with his diametrically opposed urges of being a murderer and a saviour. His name is Sok. His book is an in-depth psychological profile that explores the inevitability of his having that belief. It also looks into his life choice to accept the path of finding out who he really is, rather than succumbing to his uncontrollable killing urges that stem from an initial life-threatening event caused by his mother’s betrayal when he was four. He experienced his mother’s violence as the deepest form of betrayal coming from the person he trusted most; as a result, he became like a cat, suspicious of his environment and everyone in it. Although prior to the traumatic event, Sok had been lovingly nurtured, the subsequent hellish experience with his mother prompted him to become a love junkie suffering withdrawal from that short-lived paradise. Driven by the contrast between his early experiences of paradise and hell, the Junkie in him has spent the rest of his life trying to regain his lost paradise, holding judgment with his built-in cat-like presencing, until he resolves his suspicion that everyone is a potential murderer. The book weaves together Sok’s trauma-based life experiences, the disturbing psychological profile surrounding his traumas and about fifty of his paintings. Most of his paintings possess a distinctive 3-dimensional quality, a unique style and technique he developed through his life practice of visually manifesting his imaginings into reality. Sok’s tendency to see his thoughts in 3D originated from a desire to escape his unfortunate life through 3D fantasies in order to get a real taste of them. Sok’s childhood fantasizations, which crept into adulthood, were a direct reflection of what he missed not having in real life. Moreover, a particular group of his paintings are sequentially presented in the book to simulate an unusual, yet clarifying phenomenon he experienced seven years ago during a self-imposed two-year lockup for the sole purpose of probing into himself. The layout of Sok’s writing and paintings is thematically structured to focus on certain recurring near-death experiences, with the aim of revealing the inside experience of a person who has lived contrastively between darkness and light.
