I just happened to be watching ABC Sunday Arts on the weekend. This is not something I tend to remember to do but I got lucky and was in the right place at the right time. Luckily for me there was a segment on Goya and his series “The Disasters of War”.

It really hit a nerve for me, not only because I have a bit of a soft spot for dark and gloomy etching, but because It reminded me of something that had been sleeping in the back of my brain somewhere. It reminded me that we had actually had an excursion way back in high school, I think it was 1998. And I had actually been fortunate enough to see these etchings in the flesh.

This series is known as one of the most disturbing and graphic to date. They were left unpublished until after his death, and finally surfaced in 1863.

Long story short, Goya had seen the atrocities of the war between the French and the Spanish, lost his hearing and then his sight, all whilst in a downward spiral of torment and despair. His work got darker and more “disgusting” as he seemed to sink further into madness almost as thought he had seen too much of what the world really is and could not turn those images off in his mind. Something like the sun burning death and brutality into your retina.

I certainly found these images interesting as young teenage girl, interested in the arts and always slightly unusual. I’m sure it is the sort of thing that any young person who doesn’t quiet fit in might gravitate towards.

But what interests me, as a now 27 year old wife and mother, is how big of an impact they still have on me. I realise now, after having completed my degree, majoring in the printmaking area where we were constantly exposed to the etching process, that that one series of work may just have had a hand in choosing the direction my life has headed in.

And sometimes, as masochictic as it is, I enjoy a bit of torture and despair. And to admit that things are not all rosey and you can’t just put your head under the covers and pretend the world is perfect. But that being said, Goya lost his balance and was not able to climb back out of his negativity and it seems was forever lost to the abyss.