Take as needed for pain album cover6/19/2023 ![]() The vividly brutal imagery contained in “The Maze” is remarkably different from the paintings sequel, entitled “Out Of The Maze”, painted after the artist’s recovery. His subsequent paintings had a much less morbid outlook. ![]() Once the imagery of his illness emerged, he could step back from the canvas and talk to his doctor about his torment. His doctors are seen in one chamber as crows tormenting a helpless lizard while in another chamber the scrutinize the artist in a test tube. The various chambers depict bitter incidents in the artist’s childhood, his disillusion (The “Museum of Hopelessness”) and his cynicism (dancers seen as puppets). In the central compartment lies the rat, the artist himself, exhausted in defeat after entering each chamber. In the strange self portrait, the artist’s open skull is divided like the maze of a psychologist uses to observe a rat’s behavior. In “The Maze,” he portrayed himself lying in a field, his scull cut open to reveal the painful memories of his past and the morbid fantasies of his present state. Yet when he began to paint, the images of his torment poured out with remarkable clarity. Kurelek had great difficulty talking to people. It was during this stay that he created a painting he called “The Maze,” a harrowing portrayal of his tortured youth in Canada during the Great Depression. Additionally, the sympathetic doctors gave Kurelek a room to pursue his artistic endeavors, a passion deemed helpful by his therapists. There, the 26 year old was given treatment for schizophrenia. When he actually made some cuts on his arm, he was admitted to a hospital for psychiatric treatment. In one of these, he imagined that if he cut off the flesh of his arm (lower right chamber) he would be shocked back to human feelings. Raised on a prairie farm in midwestern Canada, he had experienced such a brutal childhood that he had become extremely withdrawn, eventually retiring into a private world of weird fantasies. The original artwork is from a grotesque painting by Canadian artist William Kurelek (1927-1977). Yet few VH fans know the story of that album art, which has a background as disturbing as the content of the songs within it. ![]() ![]() The cover remains as stirring and enigmatic as it was upon the day of the record’s release April 29, 1981. The overall theme extended to the record’s haunting cover art, which depicted some poor guying getting pummeled in the face, along with other scenes of aggression, pain and torture. This tone was set by the album’s opening track “Mean Street,”and was continued through a song-cycle filled with dark subject matter and disillusionment. When Van Halen fans first listened to a copy of the Fair Warning album in the early eighties, few could miss the fact that the band’s sunny subject matter had turned to a more somber and threatened perspective. ![]()
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