Broken Balloons

From the Foreword: The Gail Prussky Interview:

I finally met Gail at the Wm Burroughs Black Meat Juice Bar. I wanted to interview her about her new book of drawings and paintings, and her handler had told me the Burroughs was her favourite watering hole in Toronto. When she came in, I waved her over to the cricket-hide stool I’d saved for her… ” The way I see it, you paint and draw like a science-fiction insect. Like a creature not human… If reality is neurology – my formulation, my understanding – then your reality is non-human neurology, or rather, you’ve managed to become an invented creature and have created art from that invented neurology. And thus created a new reality… ”

After fifty-plus years of leading an “average, unassuming life,” the final decade as a hard-drug addiction therapist, Gail Prussky moved from the city to the country and suddenly it occurred to her that there was but a brief moment to stop the revolving door between sanity and senility, and if she didn’t act fast, she’d find herself on the wrong side. And that is when she began to draw and paint, the floodgates wide open. Her catharsis to a long life of keeping everything inside. “I’d be shooting at innocent people from a bell tower somewhere…” she is fond of quipping, “If I wasn’t an artist, I’d be a serial killer. ”

She lives north of Toronto, in Mono Mills, Ontario.