Undercity and a reflection of my past realities

 

Undercity where did the name come from? It all started one gloomy day in the month of November  several years ago. I had a vision.... So then on one windy evening the wind was howling in pain, if it could feel any pain that is....The skies were dark grey with a bright colored red in the sky like it was the end of the world, but at the same time it was also beautiful because such sightings are rather rare where I live. The trees were rustling hard against the window like finger nails tapping on the glass to get my attention. 

Before I knew it all the power in my apartment blew out and I had nothing else to do but sit there in a dim lit living room glaring out at the crimson red colored. My thoughts became so strong the wind couldn't help but weep with heavy rains coming down as the sky went from crimson red to dark cloudy gray. It then occurred to me that as a depressed individual constantly locked away inside of his miserable apartment with nothing to do besides indulge in thoughts of suicide... I'm constantly thinking about things that could make for a great story filled with visually exciting characters. 

While in the dark I had plenty of time to think and reflect because brainstorming before I create something is my specialty. I closed my eyes and rested on the sofa, listening to the chilling noises from outside I had a vision about a dark city far away in the distance with a massive Clocktower as the tallest of all towers in the entire city... It was a library full of my own creative thoughts where everything I conjured up inside of my mind was stored right there inside that very tower structure....That's what gave birth to the name "The Dark Arts Clock Tower." 

Any creative thoughts I had remained was locked away within this tower. To reach this tower you needed to put aside your fears and challenge your own comfort zone because that's what it was about, challenging your comfort zone. If you needed a safe space you weren't prepared to enter, you just didn't belong there. Of course not every thought I have is filled with violence, horror, and uncertainty. As I have done numerous things with my art that deviated away from these themes.

Undercity is a city without much sunlight, because sunlight interferes with my ability to think and concentrate.

Religion does not control the narrative here either, because my mind is free to wander about seeking things of interest that normalcy cannot always provide.  I did not wait until I was old enough to kick down the walls of Jericho so that I could learn about things I probably wouldn't have lived long enough to know about if I were unfortunate enough because no one can control their future. Whether they live or die old or young...

Well my young mind had time to develop and figure out complex ideas before I was old enough to create them visually with the tools and programs available to me at the time due to my lack of understanding of how complex things worked in the world of story telling and creativity. All I had was a pen and a notebook to write down my ideas with at the time... I had to use my imagination to figure out what the characters would look like, what sort of personalities I would give them, what kind of world would they inherit. So the moment I could start creating them visually I would have it already figured out... Because I couldn't draw, I was never going to be able to bring my work to life the old fashion way... Undercity was forged out of a broken spirit longing for the long lost past.

Undercity's main purpose and meaning was to challenge adversity, forget about reality and just think about the fictional world for a moment... Think about how dangerous this fictional world is going to be, think about the sort of things you'll be able to engage in that fictional world and how it will have this affect on you as a person who is still developing and growing even as you almost reach the middle stages of your life.

Of course not all ideas are created to be the same and in actuality it depended on what I was facing in my personal life. There are days when the storm just isn't strong enough so I must become creative without it. When the sun comes out ideas generally stagnate and the curse that many artists have encountered...We know it as writers block. Over the years I've wanted to be taken seriously as an artists because I find it very hard to accept just being some random person that decided to purchase Poser 7 back in 2012 and the first thing that came to my mind out of thousands of things I could have started out with was..."I want to make pornographic content like everyone else."

As a child growing up in a very strict religious environment, my mother use to forbid me from a lot of things she condemned as "The devil's work." I couldn't read books with demons, snarling wolves with glowing red eyes, vampires, zombies, dragons, or anything that resembled evil in any shape or form. None of these things were allowed under my mothers roof.

 I remember when I brought home several Goosebump books from the school library that I checked out because the artwork on them looked so cool at the time compared to the Fear Street novels I was allowed to read since my mother was never aware of the content in those books. They just looked like ordinary teens on a cover with shocked expressions on their faces.  See my mother wasn't aware that those Fear Street stories were even more dark and serious than Goosebumps with their teen murder story-lines where young people between the ages of 13-17 years of age were killed by other minors of the same age. 

Granted none of the stories were ever intense enough so they were still quite tame compared to adult murder thrillers of the same genre where the deaths are usually gruesome like a guy chopping his wife into pieces because she was unfaithful. Anyway when I brought home a couple of Goosebump books the first thing my mother did with those books, she took them and tossed every single one of them in the damn garbage... Then she said "why do you want to read that Witch Craft?" After I told her those weren't my books and belonged to the school, she confiscated them from the trash and took the books back to the school where I got them.

As I got older being able to create dangerously detailed characters and fascinating risk taking story-lines became a staple of my work, it was all a big part of Undercity 4 and the vision this city of art with it's Clocktower manifested. I have a few ordinary visions and concepts I come up with from time to time that may not resonate or connect well with ideas that don't fit my other vision. 

There are just things from my past that I take inspirations from outside of the darker thoughts that I have. The early 70s, 80s, and 1990s were great periods in Western history, culturally entertainment use to be really exciting, fun, stimulating and enjoyable because no one was concerned with being offended and that allowed creators to tell better stories. What I love the most about the eras of the past is that everything was able to cross the red line and being able to cross those lines allowed for some intense story telling if only people weren't so emotionally weak today. 

Overall Undercity was my attempt to challenge my own comfort zone and then the comfort zones of others by doing things artistically that no one else would have thought of or otherwise. This current generation feels so boring and dull to me that sometimes I feel that I'm living in the wrong era, an era where people don't seem to really appreciate anything that will make them feel uncomfortable. 

Having a creative mindset is not that difficult, maybe for those who struggle with their own imagination because they let reality get in the way of that or they just don't want to indulge the dark let alone entertain it because it scares them. No matter what I endured growing up, I'll never support the idea of people not being able to enjoy the extreme nature of creativity. It's what makes life worth living, because without it? Then what's the point....

Undercity was an opportunity for me to live out the darkest of my imagination. I'm no threat to anyone other than myself and fictional people can't suffer, feel pain, abuse, or anything of that matter because they aren't real so there is no need for me to hold back on what I intend to do with these characters I create.  Having a creative mindset, and an outlet to cope with the harsh realities of life, and spending every waking moment trying to avoid suicidal thoughts because of how scared, lonely and miserable I am with the way things have been going for me lately and just not going anywhere idealistically.... 

It's healthy for someone such as myself to have something to live by even if it's not much...Without it? I've got nothing else, let alone a reason or purpose for existing. Undercity is a city built on a foundation of facing the dark for those who embrace their darkest thoughts, as well as unpleasant imaginations rather than being afraid of them. I always keep in mind that fiction is exactly what it was always intended to be, and that's a way to escape from reality for awhile... 

Even though I'd much rather enjoy things in the real world more like I use to since it's been so long since I've had a significant other in my life and it's not like I can create a 3D girl out of pixels and date her even if I were to use AI to make her appear more "realistic." She's still just fiction and a figment of a dying creators imagination. Spending too much time isolated from the real world does have a negative affect on you psychologically... It can create hostility or even extreme levels of anxiety... I've gone many years without being able to confront the real world because I spend so much time living within the fictional realm severely sick and depressed and indulging in nostalgia.