I’ll start at the beginning. At the time I was learning composition, and as a reference I took a Leonardo da Vinci painting of a woman with a small animal, “Lady with an Ermine,” if I remember right. I didn’t want a classic painting. I was still painting darker art back then, so I decided to paint the same composition, but with more drama and contrast. That’s why I chose exactly those characters.

The strangest things started once I began painting. I hadn’t even planned the red moon. It came later. With every brushstroke I felt stranger. I had this sense that with this painting I was opening a portal for something.

PROCESO NUOTRAUKA JEIGU YRA

After painting sessions I often set a candle next to the painting. Then I started laying out bones around it, ones I found in the forest. Eventually I was carrying skulls out of the forest and building some kind of strange shrine. I would put the painting inside it, light the candles, and just sit there staring at it without moving. I felt like I was pulling something out of it and into myself. Something not quite alive and not quite dead. Something that doesn’t exist in this world, or has no body. I don’t know how to describe it.

People who came over told me this painting felt completely different, that the energy coming off it was insanely strong. Even people who never felt that kind of thing, or didn’t believe in it, said so. I was told to destroy it, burn it, or just stop painting. But I was desperately drawn to keep going, as if something was continuing its work through me, as if something was moving into me and working with my hands.

As the painting neared its end, I looked at it and knew something was missing. Some very important detail I can’t explain. Almost by accident I picked up red paint and dabbed it on the moon. Then I understood: the moon has to be red. I repainted it, and the painting took on a completely different meaning.

NUOTRAUKA IS ARTI

When I finished the painting, I took my finger, pricked it with a needle, and stamped it with my blood. That was probably the huge mistake.

After that I started feeling not like myself. I stopped recognizing myself in the mirror, even my gaze had changed. I was different, not quite human, just something in a human body. My view of everything shifted and I grew colder. It felt like I was losing human qualities: empathy and so on. When I met people and did some work for them, I’d joke, without joking, that instead of money they could pay me with their soul. A part of me inside heard that and it scared me, because I said it completely seriously.

NUOTRAUKA IS ARTI

In my room there was a pot that looked like an urn. I usually poured ashes into it, and threw in feathers I found on the road, broken beads, bracelets and that kind of junk. When I finished a painting, my ritual was to burn the reference I’d made and pour the ashes into the pot. I did exactly that.

There’s one more important detail I have to tell. Before all this, before anything had happened, I had placed a small animal skull on that pot, and a candle on top of it. I lit it and waited until it burned all the way down. The whole time I watched quietly, as if I was calling for something. In the evening I poured the ashes into the pot, and then the arrival happened.

That night something unexpected happened. The pot stood right above my head while I sleep. I was paralyzed, and I felt something gently insert what felt like a pipe into my head and start communicating with me. Not with words, but in a visual language: it showed images through my inner imagination like a film, and along with the images it sent sensations. It gave me something like instructions for what I had to do. I was even ordered to do it.

The next day I still doubted what had happened. That feeling, that hallucination, as I took it at the time, felt like something unspeakably enormous. A consciousness like a planet, one that could destroy our whole world with a single thought. It had reached out to me and told me how to behave and what else important I had to put in the pot. Otherwise, as a consequence, I would lose myself.

I waited for evening, and an impulse shot through my body. I started moving. I grabbed the pot, tied it in a bag so it wouldn’t spill, and rode my bike out to the forest. When I raised my head, I saw a full moon in the sky. It was red. Exactly the way I painted it.

In the forest something pulled me to one side, but I resisted hard and decided to go around. Yet everything played out so that I ended up on a little path that led me to that exact place. I stopped instantly at what I saw: a small hole, as if dug for something small, and right beside it a stone standing like a monument. A place meant for burying something. I understood what I had to do.

I took the pot and smashed it against the stone. At the same moment I cut the palm of my right hand. I poured blood over the ashes and the broken pot, and with that bloody hand I covered it all with the soil lying beside the hole, as if it had been dug specially for me. As I smashed the pot on the stone I whispered something too. A kind of prayer, I’d say, meaning I was handing the demon that lives inside me over to the earth. Something like that.

In that moment I got a new impulse: I had to hurry home before this blood dried, and mark the painting with it once more. I jumped on the bike and pedaled with everything I had. My blood started to clot and I realized I wouldn’t make it. I bit through my wound with my teeth so it would bleed again. That’s how I bought time.

Back home I ran upstairs and pretty much slammed my palm straight into the painting, so at least some of my blood would be on it again.

NUOTRAUKA IS ARTI

The next moment I grabbed a tattoo machine and started tattooing flowers on my wrists and my feet, whispering something under my breath. They were protective flowers, meant to let nothing else in, but also to let nothing out of me. That way I locked away inside me any small piece that might still be left in there, so that later, with time, I could transform it.

I felt like I had almost lost my soul through painting. Like I had almost sold it to some dark forces. My room had turned into a kind of graveyard: there were hundreds of bones in it, laid out in a really strange way.

That’s the story of this painting. I don’t know how much of it belongs to me and how much to something else. But the painting is here, and it holds everything that happened with it.