访谈录 2008-10-28&10-30 中风了,我成了艺术家!（在线收听）

In Liverpool, England, Tommy McCue painted and carved, from wall to wall, from ceiling to carpet. He covered everything in his home after a stroke caused by aneurysms on both sides of his brain.

It was a creative obsession that began a few days after he returned from the hospital. First, he began talking in rhyme and filling notebook pages with poetry. "Line after line, all the time, maybe it was in line, cup of tea just for me, nice and sweet, just be neat.”And then his wife Jane handed him a sketch pad." And he’d filled the page with these little alien heads. There was hundreds on the page and everyone on them had a different expression."

The old Tommy McCue, the one his wife knew, was no artist or poet. Early in his life, he was wild and hot-tempered. And he got in trouble for fighting, theft and heroin-addiction. "How much time did you spend in jail?” "About nine years. While in my time I spent some in solitary confinements, through violence and escapes and things like that."

 When he suffered a stroke at the age of 51, it was as if this man who once had been processed in and out of prisons had now been processed into a new existence. And doctors were no help in attempting to explain it. "It was just awful and I was constantly on the phone to people, trying to get help or I don't understand at all what's going on coz I thought he was going insane."

These are just some of the compulsive and sometimes disturbing by-products of the urge to create that followed his stroke and destroyed his marriage. He was convinced he had two brains. "I was split through earbob." He confronted his wife by claiming to be Vincent Van Gogh. "At this point, I was gotten really scared and he said you just don’t know me at all and that for all, I don’t."