Oh my god, thank you for asking this. I’ve wanted to write a headcanon about how Salome approaches her painting and this actually and totally opens the door into me being able to talk about it.
So, as we already covered, she’s most proud of her catalog of work. There are other things (her garden, omg, she’s so proud of that) but Salome’s creative streak and her paintings is what she’s the most meticulously obsessed with. Most of them are kept up in her attic and there are times where she’s relatively lax and doesn’t paint nearly as much, but if someone damaged her paintings? She might actually kill them. She doesn’t have a lot of work from before she was in her early twenties. They were burned or thrown away, mostly, or abandoned in public places because she wasn’t able to bring them home. That’s a major reason why she’s so protective of what she has now.
Salome started showing her artistic side when her mother was diagnosed with a pretty severe form of breast cancer. That would have made her between five and six years old. She drew pictures of their house and family and compiled them and brought them to her mother in the hospital, and because of her parents’ shared belief that art that doesn’t glorify god is idolatry? Her mother was disgusted and told her to stop.
So she did. At least in public. As already established, she would go to the library a lot and while she was there? Salome would read and draw things like statues around the library or out of books, but always leave what she produced there. Or throw it in the garbage, or tuck it into books.
But that’s why her art is so reminiscent of baroque pieces. That’s what she learned from.
When she was thrown out of her private school and started attending public school, she would draw there, too. Mostly to curtail the stress of the bullying she received for being this very… religious-yet-not-really kid. Then, she graduated and moved away from home and could keep her work, so she started to experiment more with various mediums and found she enjoyed painting with oils most of all. She still gave away most of her work while she was away at college, out of habit. It was one of the few things that distracted her from the fact that her parents wanted her to come home and get married.
Then she graduated and things happened (yay for abusive parents!) and she was living in her car. Not much in the way of time for painting or art, and with her Depression as bad as it ever had been. Salome had played with drugs in college but she developed a very heavy addiction to ketamine and that’s where her obsessive issue with her art started. Like, it directly stems from her overdose while she was living in her car.
If one’s not familiar with ketamine, let me explain a thing. It a very strong hallucinogenic drug even at small dosages. It’s one of the strongest, actually. Way more powerful than most strong dosages of DMT and psilocybin. It is much stronger than weed or even peyote or LSD. But it’s easy to find in labs because it’s a sedative. Salome stole hers from college.
There are five levels of a hallucinogenic experience. If you’ve ever smoked weed, you might have experienced anything from Level 1 to Level 3. The last two levels are kind of, well, objectively? They are very frightening if you aren’t actively searching out that sort of high. At Level Four, rather than just some hallucinating and euphoria, your body ceases to exist to your brain. In fact, your brain actually decides that you stop existing because nothing exists. You no longer know who you are, what your name is. Zilch. Nothing. Time also stops simply outright and you hallucinations stop being euphoric patterns insomuch as reality completely and utterly deconstructing itself around you.
And there’s a level above that, mind you.
At that elusive Level Five? Reality becomes so intangible and frightening and nonexistent beyond mathematical and artistic pattern that most people fail to even be able to describe it. You exist nowhere but everywhere and you feel as if you become one with God, or the Universe, or whatever you want to call the thing. Regardless of what you call it, or if you believe in it, it will be part of the experience. There will also be other things that talk to you, probably. Beings of light, usually. But the God thing? It is vast and all-knowing and it is the only thing part of this hallucinogenic experience that probably knows who and what you are. Basically, you are stuck in a giant depersonalized/derealized reality that is kind of like catatonic schizophrenia on the strongest steroids it could possibly find.
And once you come down from this? It will at least take hours to remember who you are, let alone whether or not you have a body and how to use it. At the very basic level. It will take weeks for everything else, maybe, to go back how to where they were before. If they do. Because, worst of all, while you’re busy having a mental breakdown because WHAT THE FUCK IS HAPPENING? This sort of level can also produce some degree of brain damage because it requires very high levels of drugs that can be fatal. A double fun fact is that the same neurotransmitters that are used for these sort of experiences as the same ones that manage and regulate our compulsions and obsessions and happiness.
Guess what Salome has had issues controlling since this experience?
Since that overdose/experience/whatever you want to call it, Salome has obsessively painting what she experienced. But also whatever images come to her head. If she doesn’t have canvas, she will paint on the walls around her. A lot of the images are very religious in their overtones even if she’s not overly religious. But at the same time, she also paints a lot of disturbing content that reminds me of Goya’s Black Paintings. Commentaries about society and culture and her background. They are fucking insane.
And if she doesn’t paint when the compulsions hit her? Salome gets really, really twisted about it. She starts to go slightly crazy, lol. Hence why she will draw on the walls of her attic studio if she has to.
But now that she’s in a place where she can keep her paintings? And they feel almost divinely inspired because of how she produces them? SHE GOES NUTS if people mistreat them. And she’s obsessively proud of them.
