This image symbolizes not only the physical but the emotional aspects of facial pain. I had attended many pain clinics which invariably involved seeing patients who had been experiencing agonizing symptoms that had unfortunately not responded to any standard medical regimens prior to this more specialist input. I noticed that orofacial pain especially had very debilitating impacts on people’s lives beyond the mere physical symptoms. I wanted my artwork to capture the shocking reality that such a patient’s daily existence comprises before treatment. My main intention was not to shock for its own sake, but the finished piece turned out to be disturbing all the same, if not shocking. It depicts a man screaming in agony, surrounded by blackness. A sheer, solid, sheet of black. From on high there is a thunder storm sending a lightning bolt down to this man- the sole source of light in this picture; all else surrounding him cannot be seen for the darkness, by him or the viewer. It is as if this sensation is so unimaginably intense and unremittingly uncontrollable that it is a force of nature; beyond taming or quantification. It is as if this unfortunate man feels as if he is the one target of nature’s wrath when he experiences this pain. His whole body radiates with the light from this bolt; his whole body is engulfed by this sensation. It would not be hard to imagine how suicide could seem like a rational escape… The usual response to first seeing this piece is to regard it as quite unnerving and uncomfortable, and I feel this is quite an appropriate reaction; it makes you have, even if only for a moment, and even if only superficially, a sense of the awful plight such individuals find themselves in.