Stigmata

"This is the story of a mind in peril and the beauty of its path to wellness and accomplishment." So begins this captivating informal pictorial biography of a talented but undiscovered artist, Jeremias Cecil Gomez, and his creative life paralleling a life plagued by tragedy and mental illness. Along with the terrible stigma and shame that mental illness often brings with it, Gomez bears disfiguring scarring on his right arm and chest from an accident in his infancy. But these misfortunes have never hindered him from producing countless works of art over the decades of his daily struggle. With shades of the trials of Vincent van Gogh, Gomez's art varies from works of colorful clarity and symmetry to depictions of the dark underworld that lurks just below the surface of what we call normal humanity. Jerry, as he is affectionally known, has recorded his life journey on all kinds of things: discarded wood, reused canvas, or anything he could find that would hold paint, crayons, nail polish, or even street tar. Many different paintings lie underneath layers of others, waiting for technology to discover and display them to the world. In the meantime, this eye-opening and highly emotive presentation of Gomez's incredible gifts and abilities shows that those afflicted with mental illness truly do have something to offer society, something miraculous! "These are Jerry's gifts to a world that holds both pain and joy. This is his suffering stigmata and his shining triumph!"