If You Want to Know How I Got Brainwashed: Story and Paintings – Betsy Dovydenas – City Point Press – 978-1-947951-40-2 – 224 pages – paperback – $24 – ebook edition available at lower prices
In many ways, this is a simple story. A woman becomes involved with a small local church and soon finds herself taken in by their practices, inculcated into what is evidently a religious cult, which she joins willingly and gradually loses her agency to. The church takes over her mind – they tell her how to live, what to do, and of course, to give money, lots of money, to the church. They try to dissociate her from her family – her husband and children are not in the church so they must be distanced. Soon, this woman does not recognize herself.
Because she has a supportive, loving family, she is rescued from the church and helped to separate herself from it, and to find herself again. She does, and she eventually sues the church for fraud and wins her lawsuit!
A simple but compelling story. In the hands of Betsy Dovydenas, this story is told in simple words and hundreds of brilliant composed and executed monoprints. The book is incredibly powerful and evocative. Its simplicity is part of what makes it so powerful. And the art is wonderfully done.
As many people have said about it, once you sit down to look at it, thinking you might delve into the story or just sample the paintings, you are instantly hooked. I could not stop once I started experiencing this book.
As Betsy says about the book, she tells how she was “tricked, sweet-talked, coaxed, manipulated, conned, coerced and exploited. In short, she was brainwashed.”
The book includes a foreword by Michael D. Langone, who is Executive Director of International Cultic Studies Association (ICSA) that is incredibly interesting as well. The psychology of cults is today incredibly important and valuable to understand. Modern mass culture is so much about the manipulation of reality that it behooves us to be as aware as we possibly can be of how easy it is for so many to fall prey to the influence of actors whose motives and desires are not in our own best interests.
It was wonderful to talk to Betsy about this book, and to hear about how she made the art in this book. It’s a terrible story in many ways, so frustrating to know that there are people who are willing to literally steal someone else’s mind in order to have power over them. But it does happen all too often and in today’s world, reading this book might help some of us recognize how cults work, how sneaky they are, and how easy it is to be taken in.
Betsy Dovydenas was born and raised in Excelsior, Minnesota, on Christmas Lake. She graduated Minnetonka High School, the University of Minnesota, and attended the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine, where she studied with Philip Wofford, Paul Resika, Willard Midgette, Annie Poor, and Mary Frank, among other artists.
Betsy has been a painter for 45 years. Monoprints are her preferred medium. She has exhibited her work at the Berkshire Museum, the Painting Center in New York, the Jacob Lawrence Gallery at the University of Washington, Seattle, the Meyerhoff Gallery at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore, the Worcester Polytechnic Institute and the Boreas Gallery in Brooklyn.
“As a painter I’ve always considered it bad luck to censor myself. As though I’d lose the ability to see the visions in my head and draw my dreams.”
I for one am really glad that Betsy has not censored herself in any way, and that she has made this exceptional book to tell her story. Buy IF YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW I GOT BRAINWASHED.
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