I am Ben Jay, an epileptic Spraycan artist, and my earliest memories are of watching water from a paintbrush disappear on the summer concrete in Atlanta at age three.

We knew that our aging art-deco high school was to be torn down the year after I graduated - our senior prank was to paint the senior hallway. In an oddly prescient moment, my contribution was the largest - a spray-painted laser cannon firing from one wall, up and over the ceiling and into an explosion on the other, directly in the center and the star of it all.

While studying film theory at USC in LA I was surrounded by the highest concentration of some of the best graffiti in the world and equally some of the worst - a result of simple proliferation. I knew in an instant a career in Hollywood was not for me - in the meantime I picked up a spraycan habit and an itchy trigger finger.

The epileptic seizures hit suddenly at 25, obliterating any edge and direction I held. Anger and frustration abounded - at my shattered life, at any plans I had, at the day-to-day uncertainty of whether I could draw a clean line or think a full thought. My sudden inability to perform things I had known my whole life could strike at any moment, and it did. Often.

After being unable to work for 7 years, everything was running dry. Savings obliterated, bridges for favors and assistance nearly all burned, brain damage and memory issues seared in forever. Never having or maintaining friendships again was a real possibility - increasingly exasperated family diagnosed with PTSD from watching me almost die so many times. But they were my only possibility for human interaction, save the faceless faces at the various hospitals that fluttered past like 52-card pickup.

Then lightning struck. The method discovered itself - discovered me. I began to put weight on the only intact part of my brain: Vectors. Portraits. And here we are.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

The cold and soulless details:

My seizures hit suddenly, and I was forced to cease my part time profession of waiting tables at a high-volume restaurant in Austin. Can’t be carrying trays of glass and hot pizzas over peoples heads in a crowded space if you might seize it all over the diners.

It also prevented me from keeping or gaining any kind of momentum in my mental progress in my journey to create something truly new. It prevented me from keeping a sharp eye on anything, let alone the progress that was being made in the art world. I was leapfrogged by the internet, something my generation lives and breathes, in those first years I spent sore and shattered on the rim of an endless gong.

I had to relearn smooth movement and recalibrate my gimbal, a weeks-long process, after every seizure, just in time for the next one to hit. This left me with a week, at most, between seizures where the mental and physical seizure hangover allowed me an incredibly frustrating attempt at regaining the dexterity I once had. Not as severe as the videos you see of stroke victims needing to be taught how to walk again, more akin to the first few lunges for your phone right after you wake up… but all day, every motion. A drone missing a propeller. A remote control helicopter that suddenly has a giant magnet hovering above, below and behind it, randomly pulling and yanking each time.

I have gone from fluid lines and letters to chickenscratch overnight. It’s not like you build a tolerance for frustration in all this either, that part of your brain is just as tired. I have many pages in sketchbooks, immediately following a detailed and completed sketch, that are single scribbles, two attempts at the same letter, then a tear in the page where I stabbed the pen into the book and a scuff on the corner from throwing it across the room.

I have had the unique advantage several times of looking at my own work completely objectively. Memory is a vast and fuzzy spectrum but some things, depending on their proximity to the seizure, become fully irretrievable. It is nice to look at a piece that “someone else” drew in your perfect style, to be able to say “Oh, that works, that doesn’t. Why couldn’t I/he see that?”

It also leads to reckless experimentation. Angry lines, faster speed, thinner spray when it moves, wider when it flares.

Two years after I began having seizures I met a graf writer from LA who writes “THANKS.” I told him I liked the moniker, he replied “....thanks.” with a knowing nod. He finished his beer, grabbed a can, and went with unbelievable force, like no one I have ever seen, at the wall. He climbed it, attacked it, hated it, thrashed it, ground the can into the wall… all with a blessedly calm consumption that betrayed the intensity and severity and just anger of his lines. His pieces are, even for graffiti, thoroughly illegible. But motion translates. There are pieces with sharp and dynamic lines, some even more illegible than his, but no one can touch the expressive impact of his brand of nonsense.

It’s like trying to get your head around the severity and intensity and weight of a hieroglyph, one whose meaning is unknown. Who knows what it means, but lord does it mean it well, and with force.

It’s like the mystery of hearing another language spoken and wondering about the intensity and emphasis on certain syllables… are they playful or angry? Is that gesture rude within the entire culture, or does this individual just do that himself?

Or how Chinese tonal music can sound like chalkboard razors to Western ears. The meaning is wholly unknown and an amalgam of sounds that could mean anger or satisfaction or pining or true love or any number of musically expressed emotions all played at once and seemingly at the wrong times.

Anyone who listens can interpret that there is meaning packaged, the impulse that forced the words from their mouth was a real one… built of the basic blocks that form all emotions, but stacked differently, blended in ways we’re not familiar with.

But the gaze is there. Illegible shapes that look directly at you.

And frantic, extraneous, quark-path movements of frustration and exasperation… well I had a lot of those to go around.

I just didn’t know where to put them.

I wished I had a steel stencil I could flail and scream through.

One that would filter all recognizable meaning and do the thinking I was momentarily incapable of as those moments arrived and departed with violent uncertainty. I couldn’t rely on myself to be there while I was painting.

A solid pinball bay I could loose bearings upon and watch the lights and bumpers seize, keeping the ones that happened to catch meaning as they flew.

One night, while trying to do something else, I did. Entirely on accident. Through a maneuver I had always figured would work but had never tried, for whatever unknown reason. It was a concept conceived before technology allowed, so my first generation Ipad, the contemporary photoshop of the time, and I patiently waited ten years and forgot.

It took my absence from my own life to bring about a hail mary that had always had a good shot.

Seizures are like a hurricane that hits a warehouse in your brain. The things you need are now buried under utter randomness. One reaches for a “where were you last week” and finds “Hasdrubal was actually Hannibal Barca’s brother, not his father.”

So in exasperation, after a failed attempt at letters, I reluctantly reached for my knowledge of balance and color to find a way to correct it and encountered a glitch. There in the pile I found the lighting of a particularly bland gas station in Iowa, how to spell “Acquired”, the weird way that one guy used to say “Bolth,” the protocol for placing accents on vowels in spanish words and that I forgot to buy cigarettes.

When the nothing cleared, there it was.

Like the car keys you had in your hand the whole time you were frantically late for the most important meeting of your career.

The ones you found when they clattered to the ground when you finally let go.

Out of exasperation.

The shattering clink brings silence, then a feeling of stupidity. You realize that no one is watching, and that you have somewhere to be.

So you pick them up, forgive yourself, and fucking drive.