I have been writing a book about my experience with prostate cancer: Waking Up in the Cave of Cancer – a journey through darkness into healing.

Yet I intuitively knew as an artist that I also had to paint my experience, and I had to do it while treatment was still in process. Four chapters in, I put the book aside to create the art works in this exhibit.

Angels in the Dark comprises a series of paintings that express my journey through the darkness of dis-ease. Inspired by my current treatment of cancer, it is also informed by my recovery from addiction and depression.

When I began the painting process, I imagined that I could give the cancer and my prostate full reign to paint whatever they felt compelled to express, using my hands as their tools.

At first uncertain and tentative, a process soon began to take hold. What finally emerged is a body of work that looked as if two artists had created it instead of one. But there was a single theme – and it surprised me.

It was not portraits of disease that poured out on the canvas. Nor was it a series of images of healing. Rather, what were emerging were paintings of the healers! I was meeting what felt like the inner spiritual energies that were guiding and transforming my illness into wellness. And they were showing up as Angels. Angels in the dark.

Each painting was a story in itself and each was a part of a greater story. Painting them helped me move through the darkness of my fears, anger and grief over the disease. 

If you glance at them in sequence, you will see that they gradually darken until, at the end, they abruptly lighten again. This is how my journey has been and continues to be. It began in the casual, unremarkable light of day-to-day life, took itself into the ominous and mysterious darkness of the unknown, and re-emerged into the light of conscious awareness.

In other words, I travelled from naïve to lost to awakened.

As I said, in additional to telling a collective story about the overall process, each image also has its own story. It is these stories that helped me in my healing. Some of the stories are quite short, and some a little longer, but each helped me sort out what I was going through. 

We all experience periods of darkness in our lives. We enter, most often unwillingly, into a cave of unseeing and unknowing where the sense of threat is real and our fear is palpable. We want to run but there is nowhere to go – we have to accept the hero’s quest of walking through the experience toward healing, or the darkness will consume us.

It is my hope that you can view each painting from your own perspective, and let it touch your story – not just mine. That way, this collection can serve the purpose of rippling out to help you personally, and others who experience it, and not simply illustrate my experience.

The paintings cannot be taken literally. They are not meant to be understood, but felt. So I hope you will allow your heart and mind to be open to your own personal feeling and response to them. Same with the words that go with the paintings, which are almost like meditations. Let them float into your heart instead of your mind, and allow yourself explore your own truth, your own experience, your own Angels.

 Thank you for joining me on this sacred, personal journey.

George Herrick is an artist, life coach, modern shaman, author and poet who paints under the name Lasua, which would have been his last name had his paternal grandfather not been adopted and taken his adoptive father’s name, Herrick. It is a way for George to honor this part of his lineage.

Exhibit