The Hike of Transformation: Nature, Art, and the Connecting Troubling Reality
To unwind, Saunders went hiking with his buddy Brandon Bragg, something he hadn't done before. "It was incredible," he said. "I had 5 pounds of art supplies with me! Every day, I saw tons of beautiful things in nature. I'm from the city and so every new kind of bark I saw, or toadstool, or wild animal gave me such a rich wealth of phenomena to draw and see myself in a totally different world. That experience was truly miraculous and healing.
“While Brandon and I were hiking one day, he asked me, 'Whatever happened with that documentary you were going to make with the veterans and the loonies?' And I told him how everything had happened so fast with the tragedies and how I thought the people would be really interesting to document, but in fact they were all on drugs, suffering in solitude, some too obese to physically leave their apartment, and for many, it was all they could do to get out of their recliners 3 times a day.”
“I told him how when I first moved in, a paraplegic in a wheelchair showed me an encyclopedia of pills and said he could find at least one of every kind of pill in that book in the building and that book was huge."
The Unraveling Journey: Art, Hallucinations, and a Radical Project
When Saunders and Bragg returned to NY, the artist unknowingly became dehydrated, hallucinating, and had a psychotic break. He ditched his friend at a monastery because he thought he was trying to poison him.
"I took the Greyhound straight back to Tennessee, where I had an epiphany. I thought, not only am I going to draw myself every day, but I'm also going to do a different drug every day. After all, there was one of everything in the building... And that was when I officially started the project."
A combination of dark sadness and easy access led Saunders to satisfy his drive to experience as many different things as possible.
From Viral Controversy to Empathetic Connection: the Impact of Saunders' Experiment
He said the images first went viral in January 2011, and it was "excruciatingly distressing and morbidly terrifying." Saunders got quite a few hate mails. "They either wanted me to commit suicide myself, or they themselves wanted the honor of putting me down like an animal. Sleazy companies came out of the woodwork too," he recalled. "This time around it's been so much nicer and friendlier."
But the popularity of this one experiment is enormous. "It gives people an opportunity to discover some of the other things I do or have done as well. Things that I feel are a lot more important, both socially and artistically. And it's also opened the door to communicate with some other incredible people who feel that they are alone in the world, and in one way or another are suffering and having trouble. I'm older and like to think I can be of some help in that department."
