Jonathan was once a talented artist. When he is well he makes delicate, exquisitely crafted ink drawings, some of which he has given me and which I have proudly put up on the walls of my office. When he is unwell the nature of his art changes. He becomes more prolific, but the precision and clarity are lost. Lines become scrambled and entangled, the colours lurid, and over the images he compulsively scribbles reams of indecipherable prose and poetry. There is no sign at all of the graphic skill and the almost cold formality of the works he produces when he is well. He creates these mad works in an apparent frenzy and foists them on me with enthusiasm. On one admission he decides to transform his bed in the dormitory of the admission unit into an installation. He collects branches and bits of wire and string and other random objects that he finds in the ground of the hospital and constructs an elaborate canopy over the bed. It is a ramshackle mess and requires considerable agility on his part simply to get access to the bed. I am deeply impressed that the nursing staff and cleaners allow this. The other patients are bemused, but despite their disorganised behaviour they make no attempt to interfere with this delicate and bizarre construction. There seems to be some shared acknowledgement that this is a project, a work in progress - and that, however incoherent, is important to Jonathan.
His different, distinct ways of expressing himself seem to reflect in an eloquent way his shifting states of mind. It is not simply that when he is well his art is good and when he is sick his art is bad - not art at all, just incoherent ravings and scribblings. This elaborate, intricate, chaotic installation that he has constructed with such painstaking care in the ward suggests a quite desperate determination to give a three-dimensional form to something that is menacing and that could otherwise overwhelm him. He seems compelled. The task is urgent.
The finely executed drawings he creates when he is well seem to serve another function, to be necessary in a different way. There are in these images another type of need, a careful imposition of order, of precision, of the clear demarcation of spaces. It is as if there are two different strategies for dealing with his madness. When he is ill in hospital, the spontaneous uninhibited process of giving form to inner turmoil with the hope of gaining control ins in tension with the formal mastery he displays when he is well - a determination, having regained control, to maintain it, to keep at bay the disorder of psychosis.