Blood Intimate Blood

Blood is a very intimate thing, so you can hardly blame me for feeling a bit shy and hesitant about sharing the sight of my  blood with the world. Usually it is unseen inside the body. In the case of hemo-dialysis*, blood must flow outside the body in order to pass through the artificial kidney and then return, cleansed of toxins and fluid overload back into the bloodstream. 

Bamboo Shoots Inc crew on behalf of Sasktel MaxTV at dialysis pod.

Can you blame me for being shy and nervous about showing my blood -outside of my body- to the world? I am concerned...will the sight of this be more traumatic to the viewers as it was at first to me?

Blood having "Out-of-Body Experience".

I had to shed my misgivings before I could go ahead with filming this segment of the documentary. Our producer Amanda Bosiak was so warm and loving that everything flowed effortlessly on set. The "set" was my dialysis pod, at my request to raise more Awareness of Kidney Health. 

*Hemo-dialysis is a technological marvel, invented by Dr. Willim Kolf in 1943, that has come a long way to recreate kidney function. Dialysis sustains the lives of millions of kidney patients every year. Dialysis is the "Gold Standard" for life-saving intervention while hopefully, they await the "Gift of Life". This time of relative "stability" must not be mistaken for "complacency", as it is well known that a certain % of dialysis patients die while waiting for a transplant. 

"Dancing with Rejection"...the NYC connection!

My last post lamented that fact that the "Interior Formatting" of my upcoming memoir "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" was making me crazy. Sure, I was able to figure out the formatting on my own computer...no problem. But when it came to uploading my impeccable file to my online publishing platform, everything went squishy and stretchy in a completely random way, or so it appeared to me.

After trying and retrying about fifteen times, I grew increasingly  frustrated. Seeing as how I am a exemplary specimen of male pattern baldness...I take after my Dad in this respect...I really do not have that much hair to pull out, so I was left without this pressure valve. All I could do was gnash my teeth and pound my fist on my desktop. Didn't help. I was still stuck, with my nose pressed against the glass, merely desiring to make it work, but left feeling impotent.

I did, however, reach out to my social network and was richly rewarded when a friend named Annaleigh Sage Bergman, herself a recent kidney donor, stepped up to announce that she has the expertise to create the interior formatting. This is a crucial step that we must take in order to go to press! I was like, WOO-HOO!  Sage is based in New York City and we recently met through the Facebook page Kidney Transplant Donors and Recipients that I founded about three years ago.

As I drill deeper into this writing project, I am meeting more loving, supportive people who are all combining their unique skill sets to make it a reality. I'm humbled and grateful to everyone who has offered their help. You will read all about it in the "Gratitude" section of the book after it hits the press in the near future.

Crowd-Sourcing Cover Art Yields Good Results

After all of the insightful comments and suggestions from my friends from around the planet in the past 24 hours, I am nudging the cover art design for the soon-to-be-released memoir "Dancing with Rejection: A Beginner's Guide to Immortality" further along. Graphic Design is not my strong suit, but I feel I'm making good progress thanks to a little help from my friends.

The text on the back reads as follows:

I am discovering as I get closer to publication that my publisher offers a plethora of distribution options, including hard copies made available at Amazon.com, Ebook format at Kindle, etc. Am I getting excited? You bet.

Did I mention I am publishing a memoir?

A Passion Project of mine for the past several years has been first the collating, transcribing and then finally the writing and attending to the editing of the memoir/novel 'dancing with rejection: the beginner's guide to immortality'. It's a rollicking, adventurous drama that traces my life from the early death of my father, through to my own brush with death and on to chronicle the rise in my fortunes as a monumental mural painter and advocate for patients' rights. There is an early illustrated synopsis that you can view here: Near-Death Experience Fuels Quest for Immortality.

Getting closer to creating the official cover art for my upcoming novel 'dancing with rejection:
the beginner's guide to immortality'.

My latest project is to promote the cause of, wait for it, 'Reasonable Efficient Notifications and Action Law (RENAL)'. This begins with a petition that I invite you to sign. Takes like 15 seconds in total. We are asking for better, clearer, more timely communication between kidney transplant centers and their millions of potential kidney donors and recipients. Please, take a few seconds to sign, if you know anybody with kidney disease. Chances are, you do.

Near-Death Experience Fuels Quest for Immortality: An Artist's Story

To live or to die, that is the question.

In 1979 at age 19, while living and working as a freelance artist in Toronto my health was dramatically imperiled by End-Stage Renal Failure. If the term 'End-Stage' sounds ominous, it's because it was! 

Without emergency medical intervention I would've been a dead man. The toxins had accumulated to such  lethal levels that the team of ER doctors  were shocked that I had even managed to make it into Sunnybrooke Hospital on my own two feet. 

Depiction in pencil of the 'Shribner Shunt' to initiate emergency dialysis. (10:48 am, April 4th, 1979) 

After my timely diagnosis I was outfitted with a 'Shribner Shunt' that allowed emergency dialysis therapy the very next morning. Once I had received the dialysis therapy for about five months I started to feel more human and less like a walking toxic waste dump. Kidney failure is an extremely precarious state of being!

My neighbor on the dialysis ward with my machine in the foreground, April 1979.

Making the best of a crappy situation.

A wonderful resource person at the hospital arranged for me to take over an empty room in the hospital as a make-shift studio and even supplied me with a budget in order to outfit myself with paints and canvas to enable me to start painting again as a way of getting back on my feet to regain a sense of normalcy in my shattered life. 

I decided to create a mural that I called 'Recovery I' as a salutation to what I hoped would be an eventual return to health. You might say that this mural was an 'invocation' for my own recovery from what was a shockingly horrific disease.  As a small token of appreciation for the excellent medical care and life-saving intervention I received at Sunnybrooke, I decided to donate this mural to the institution.  It hangs in the main lobby there to this day.

"Recovery I" was designed and painted as an invocation for my own eventual recovery from the ravages of End-Stage Renal Failure.

Extreme adversity leads to a life-long commitment...


Although the onslaught and aftermath of this disease was a huge setback that caused a lot of negative impacts in my life, I can now in retrospect say that the net benefits of the whole experience far outweigh the deleterious. Although I certainly would not recommend this trial by fire to anyone, for me the experience set me on a path to self-discovery though my path as a life-long artist that I would never regret. 

Sure, there have been times when I almost wished I had settled for a more financially secure career but all in all, it has been a great ride and just keeps getting better!

Inspiration or Delusion? Let History Decide.

Very soon after my eventual kidney transplant...which freed me from the exhausting routine of thrice-weekly dialysis treatments...I was a recipient of another kind: a powerful vision came to me in a vivid 'waking dream' of three triangles hovering in space. They contorted and rotated to join together to form a single design of three triangles 'within' a single triangle. Lest I sound like a total nut-job in describing this as a 'mystical experience' I will share with you the exciting development of the following days.

With the confidence of one 'inspired', I took my crude pencil sketch of my three triangles to the Archbishop of Halifax at the time, professing to him that I believed it to be a 'mystical vision' that encapsulated the mystery of the 'Trinity', which in Roman Catholic terms is the 'Father, Son and Holy Spirit'.

Much to my delight and amazement (but really, not a huge shock or surprise; I was THAT confident) the Archbishop made an executive decision on the spot and assigned the parish priest to oversee the execution of a mural in St. Mary's Basilica which I proceeded to work on with vigor!

Applying the first few strokes on 'Trinity AD 1981' at St. Mary's Basilica in Halifax.

After about three months I had completed the mural which I called "Trinity AD 1981" in the modest setting of the Parish Hall of the Basilica. My dream at the time was to someday be commissioned to design and paint a much larger and grander mural in the Sanctuary of a sacred space. Alas, this was not to be...until exactly 30 years later!

The finished mural 'Trinity AD 1981' in its humble setting at the parish hall of St. Mary's Basilica.

Although the mural was a fairly modest size and scope, it generated a lot of notoriety in the local media. I think the main reason for this was the audacity of an 'outsider' taking his unlovely pencil sketch into the hallowed offices of the Archbishop with the confidence that it would be honored by a designate wall on which to flesh it out to a full-blown mural. Take that!

My mother Shirley Gaudet stands with the Archbishop James Hayes and myself on the occasion of the unveiling.

Success ALWAYS leads to more success!

In my experience, one success ALWAYS leads to more success and this was a good test for that theory. Soon after the completion and unveiling of this early mural, I was recruited as a 'liturgical design apprentice' to the eminent Interior Decorator and Architect the (late) Reverend Father Toby McIvern with the Montreal design firm Desmarais and Robitaille Inc. where I worked for two very formative years. 

Indeed, Fr. Toby's glowing letter of endorsement was key to my much later commission of 2011/12  to design and paint a huge, ambitious mural in the coveted 'sanctuary' of Sacred Heart Chaldean Catholic Church in Saskatoon. 

(The late) Reverend Father Toby McIvern posed for a quick pencil sketch on 11/05/85. The decorative 'doodles' in the background were rescued out of the wastepaper basket as Toby tossed them out after a chat on the phone.

I have chosen these particular artworks to drive home the point that artistic vision and 'inspiration' remain potent and powerful forces even in today's world; they are not outmoded artifacts of a bye-gone era. 

Working high up on the scaffold on the upper right-hand side of 'March of Trinity' aka 'Trinity 2011'.

Imagine my state of mind working on the ambitious mural that covered the entire sanctuary wall of Sacred Heart Chaldean Catholic Church fully 30 years after the humble 'Trinity AD 1981'. Words like 'ecstasy' and 'euphoria' come to mind...if only things were that simple.




If you want to take a closer look at the work-in-progress of this 2011 mural, check this video which pans across the entire surface and proffers some intimate views obtainable only by high-definition zoom lens, as the artwork soars to a height of almost fifty feet at the apex.

30 years after the creation of 'Trinity AD 1981' in Halifax I was honored to stand with His Excellency Roman Catholic Bishop of Saskatoon Donald Bolan and Father Sabah, parish priest of Sacred Heart Chaldean Catholic Church in Saskatoon, SK. on  03/03/2012, the day of  the official unveiling ceremony of 'March of Trinity' aka 'Trinity 2011'.

Not wanting to be typecast in any way shape or form as a 'religious' artist, I have created a prodigious number of murals across Canada over the past 30 years in the secular realm. Here is a selected mural portfolio with The Urban Wall in Saskatoon to give you an idea.


In case you were wondering, I remain to this day a successful kidney transplant thanks to the 'Gift of Life' from my loving brother Steven. He is doing well after 33 years too! One of my long-term goals is to be recognized as the World's Longest Surviving Kidney Transplant Recipient and at over 33 years I am definitely in the running. Just sayin'.