Customer Reviews

Drawing it Out: Befriending the Unconscious (A Contemporary Woman's Psychedelic Journey)

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"Drawing It Out" brings to mind the closing lyrics of the
title song from "Mash":

"'Cause suicide is painless.
It brings on many changes.
And I can take or leave it if I please.
...And you can do the same thing if you choose."

Like Suicide, Self Procreation/Re-Creation "brings on many
changes," but it's hardly ever Painless, as Ms. Frances'
gripping chronicle of her odyssey makes overflowingly clear.

The text is deceptively plain-spoken. Until well after the
fact, I scarecely realized how deftly she conveys complex,
elusive notions and feelings as if in a treasured letter
from a dear friend.

As for the images, words can't describe them. Powerful,
moving, disturbing, revealing, truthful, tormenting --
toss a stack of such adjectives into a hat and cook until
you concede that words can't describe these drawings.

"Drawing It Out" is an enthralling exhibit of a
Spiritual Epiphany -- "a sudden manifestation of the
essence or meaning of something" (American Heritage Dictionary).

Don't read "Drawing It Out" unless you're prepared to risk
the challenge of searching-out the Epiphany of YOUR Self...
Pretty Scary Thought, eh?

In this deeply moving and courageous account of personal transformation, artist Sherana Frances offers the reader a unique glimpse into the psyche of the creative spirit. In the 60's, Frances was part of a controlled study of the effects of LSD. During that experience, she drew from herself a kind of artistic expression that became her own unique path on her journey of self-discovery. She literally and figuratively drew it out. The astonishing a sensuous series of sixty-one drawings, created at that time and over the decades that followed, is accompanied in this book by a poignant, intensely personal written account of her life challenges and the evolution of her consciousness. It is not unusual for people to use journal-writing as a tool of personal exploration. Frances, however, has chosen drawing as her tool, resulting in an entirely unusual process of epiphany and self-revelation. This book is as beautifully written as it is beautifully drawn, and the candor of her account reveals the author's uncommon courage. Explaining his own artistic motivation, Andrew Wyeth wrote, "I think one's art goes as far and as deep as one's love goes." Nowhere is that more evident than in Sherana Frances's DRAWING IT OUT.

There is a freshness about this work-in-two-media. With the rendering (and rending) of the artist's soul there is also, thank goodness, the reassurance of language-like a bridge over it's troubled waters. As a word person myself, I am particularly facinated by the picture part of the work, but also by the interplay between the two.

The essential candor of the visions demands from the artist an equal openness in the text, so that the two potentiate each other, so to speak, like the gin and vermouth which become something else in a successful martini. It is powerful stuff.

And then, too, William Blake, a master in two media, comes to mind. The probing and the sharing of the inner workings of a human being are about as intimate as one can get, aren't they? And yet, the artist's own determination to give an honest portrayal allow the work to transcend the wrenching experience of it's raw, very raw materials.

I wouldn't have missed it for the world.

This is a dramatic, moving and eloquent document. No hippie hunting ecstatic experience, no mere tripster, Sherana Harriette Frances records, in word and drawing, the symbolic death and rebirth of a woman artist through medically guided use of LSD, in the early sixties.

Every first generation American child of immmigrant parents lives in some degree the shock, the alientation from family and the necessarily sometimes brutal struggle to translate oneself out of the parental culture without destroying familial bonds.

Ms. Frances, in her agony of escape and rebirth from child of immigrant Cretan parents into her life of American woman artist, offers through these drawings, as well as in her own very literate written report, the agonizing stages of this liberation.

She has created an original testament to the profound struggle required and to the everlasting power of art to convey that struggle in appropriate metaphor.

She took the ancient Minoan bull of her ancestry by the horns and rode him to the kill - to her resurrection as American woman and as artist. Brava!...

Drawing It Out is an intimate and inspirational account of the author's one-time experience with the drug LSD under controlled conditions, and how that experience led to dramatic, life-changing events portrayed in the book, not only in words but in 61 of the author's powerful drawings.

Her story is riveting and offers an unprecedented graphic look at how a contemporary woman's personal transformation unfolded over a period of 20 years. The author reveals the hidden processes of the unconscious mind as she navigated her way through painful relationships, emotional pain, loss and death.

Not only for those interested in the therapeutic value of psychedelics, but for everyone interested in personal transformation through the power of art and the human spirit.

As a person interested in the origins of imagination, creativity and spirituality, I've never felt as close to the source of these ethereal human qualities than through this book.

The descriptions written about these things for centuries are always limited by the term ineffable. The one area that has come closest to describing this domain is art.

Harriette Frances' one LSD experience in the early 60's, shattered her everyday world as she had wanted, but the hoped for reintegration of her psyche didn't occur for quite awhile until she was able to use the one tool at her disposal to describe her conflicted worlds: her art.

Yet her need to fulfill a lifetime obsession to create art was the source of the conflict that was causing pain to her, her husband and her children as she couldn't resolve this need with her culturally-defined roles of good wife and mother.

What emerged finally were a number of series of powerful drawings that arose like molten lava from her subconscious that encapsulated the rage and torment of her daily life.

As one views these images and reads Frances' own analyses of them--sometimes from a point of view many years removed from their creation--it is stunning to consider how much of who we are lies under the surface of our exterior demeanor and personality.

While our own depictions of our subconscious might not possess the sheer brutality or violent and erotic nature as hers, what is obvious is there is an enormous amount yet to be learned about our minds.

It seems apparent to me that if Harriette Frances had not had her LSD experience, which was the key that eventually unlocked what was hidden away in her subconscious, she would have become just another casualty of a mental health system which would have merely labeled her "psychotic"--and if further attempted suicides wouldn't have ended her suffering, she might easily have ended up first in a mental institution, then dumped onto the street when mental institutions were closed around the country in the 70's.

But perhaps the greater tragedy is that LSD, once a major research tool in this country and elsewhere was banned even for research and psychotherapeutic purposes when the government ignorantly and abominably overreacted to the unsupervised use of the substance in the 60's by young people whom the government feared they couldn't control to their satisfaction.

So at this point, "Drawing It Out" serves as a historical footnote to a period in our society that didn't yet fear itself and where the need for man to explore didn't include just outer space, but the even more incredible domains of our own inner space.

This is a profound and evocative portrayal in both artistic and literary modes of the authors' powerful psychedelic experiences.

There are many paintings done while under the influence of psychedelics. However, there are none that I am aware of that so exquisitely portray the developmental sequence of experiences during a session, or of the subsequent maturation that the session induced.

I have used these drawings in a variety of teaching formats and students are invariably impressed or even awed by them. I also am awed and delighted with what the artist has done and recommend the book highly.

Robert Elliott, A contemplative reader