Hadley Rotter
Dark and Stormy Night, 2021
Acrylic on Canvas

I have always found a certain joy and even comfort in scaring myself. I’ve struggled with anxiety all my life so being in control of my fear, whether it’s through hunting for ghosts or reading scary stories, is an empowering feeling. Dark and Stormy Night is part of a larger series of paintings exploring these moments of terror in my life that I look back on fondly, sharing these eerie, liminal, and haunted spaces of my mind with the outside world.

2012’s Hurricane Sandy was an event that brought about a lot of fear I couldn’t control; large storms have always scared me, a week-long power outage meant facing the dark, and the main light source in my room was a candle – I’m terrified of open flames. So what’s an anxious kid to do? Well, I focused on scaring myself in the ways I did like. I stayed up until the early hours of the morning, reading stories of murderous ghosts and dystopian futures, curled close to the candlelight that scared me so much. And it was in that way that I found the small scraps of comfort in a very discomforting world.