Ice Storm

Having some pretty wild winter weather in Texas due to the polar vortex sweeping over the northern hemisphere.

Vapor With Cigarette

Revisiting an older idea…

No Safe Haven

I have always struggled to sleep. I have an active imagination with very little filter, which can be a bad thing when you spend a lot of time overcome with anxiety. A lifetime of unease and agitation has twisted my gut into knots and sends my brain racing with intrusive thoughts and destructive, imaginary encounters. It used to take me hours to fall asleep each night while my rational brain tried to smooth out years of ingrained tensions and fears. Over the years I have practiced all sorts of mindful meditation, breathing exercises, counting, and calming visualization that has, to some degree or another, helped in small ways, each bit of growth building upon itself.

I’m best at visualizing. Like waking dreams, scenes will materialize in my head and play out like a movie. The past couple of years I have happened across a few that I saved because they seemed helpful. I go to these places when I have trouble relaxing enough to fall asleep or I just need to focus on something and break the chain of a destructive mode of thinking. This is one such place. This one requires a lot of active participation on my part and is somewhat of a challenge.

I imagine I am in the middle of the ocean with nothing but a metal buoy to hang on to. I can sense how deep and vast the open ocean is, and what kind of creatures are roaming around underneath me. Bigger-than-life whales, sharks, squids, and huge schools of fish. Sometimes instead of sharks and whales underneath there are ancient behemoths from prehistoric times and pterodactyls flapping around overhead. Sometimes the waves around me are calm—with easy swells and sunny skies—and sometimes it is overcast and windy, the water choppy and sharp. At other times it is night and it’s dark out, the water a black smudge around me. 

All of this is fairly terrifying to me as I cling to the buoy. When I try to let go a thrilling sort of adrenaline fills my body as I begin to drift down towards the ocean floor. It’s a long, slow way down as I try to make peace with the darkening void surrounding me and the giants I know are swimming just out of view. Sometimes I don’t get to the point where I can let go—it’s challenging enough to just be there holding the buoy—but when I can let myself descend down, I feel a freeing sense of peace beyond the fear. 

I named this painting No Safe Haven because it represents a sort of crossroads where one is compelled to make a decision, and it’s not always clear what the best one is.

Note: the image has been updated since I’ve reworked the painting some.

Transformations From 2018

It’s hard to look at older work sometimes. I am often stuck in such a self-critical mode I can only think about what I could have done better, and not what I actually did accomplish. But at some point you have to tell yourself to just lighten up and enjoy these things you have spent time and effort creating. You made them and they exist and sometimes that’s enough.

Radish Self. Oil on paper. 2018.

Fish Self. Oil on paper. 2018.

Wind Self. Oil on paper. 2018.

Unripe Lemon Self. Oil on paper. 2018.

Self. Oil on paper. 2018.

This Painting is Very Hard to Photograph

I should probably get a better camera, but there is some kind of property of this painting that slightly blurs in every picture I take no matter what the lighting situation is.

While taking pictures of Josh for a portrait, he adopted a slightly concerned, slightly wide-eyed far away look and murmured “My gosh, look at that ship capsizing over there.” Typical to Josh’s nature, it turned out to be the best picture I took so I decided to run with it. I like the imaginary narrative it created as well as the sense of a slowly impending disaster that a lot of us are feeling lately in real life.

A Pretty Good Mouth

I made these studies back when we lived in our old one bedroom apartment where I worked out of a tiny corner of the kitchen. Space was super tight and I knew I wanted to incorporate these ideas into a large painting, and so I had to put the idea on the backburner and do smaller projects instead. It’s really challenging to work where you live, especially when you have two small boys that love to get into everything and “help” draw over your drawings and paintings. I love their creativity, but RIP some of my work.

Self as Fish Study, oil on paper, 2019.

I was so excited to move to our new house and make the garage into studio space. I am slowly circling around these motifs and reimagining what I want to do with them now that I have the space and materials. The main idea in these is celebrating an exuberant grotesqueness, which I love because of the subsequent feeling of mental freedom.

Self as Fish Study, oil on paper, 14x17”, 2019.

These studies are particular favorites of mine, and I go back to them often when I am feeling insecure or vulnerable about my own work. They help me remember what I like about my work, and guide me back onto a productive path.

That feeling when it appears that you have no good work and what the heck have you even been doing for the past several years?

I’ve had this website since senior year of college and have rarely updated it. It contained my senior thesis work of cyanotypes and some other random newer works. It’s presence weighs heavily on my mind because it’s so old and unloved and I know I have to delete it and start over, but I have failed to do much about it because I feel so stymied by the fact that I have not been able to make a coherent enough body of work over the last several years to really make the effort. I work all the time but feel like I never make anything worthwhile, in part because my skills are constantly evolving so I have a hard time looking back on past work when I feel like it has propelled me forward and past it.

But I am going to start doing a new radical thing where I look at my efforts in a positive light instead of a negativity that is constantly dragging me down. So here is a new website for my newer work with a format I can have a better relationship with. I am going to use it to spend more time organizing my thoughts on art in a more formal way, and to talk about my inspirations and my creative growth as an artist.

I will be adding older and newer images of my work as I make posts. And here, in my first new post, I am going to talk about my favorite painting that I have done.

Grounded, 2018, oil on canvas, 30” x 40”.

I made this painting in 2018 and it remains one of my favorite pieces. For one, I feel like I was able to execute my ideas in a much more competent way than I usually do and I like how luminous I was able to render the pigeons with my color choices. I was being inspired by french modernists like Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas.

It is one of those paintings where the reading of it has come to me in pieces over time. None of the pigeons are looking at each other, they are all staring off into different directions, except for the two at the back who are staring in parallel directly at the viewer, suggesting a confronting attitude. Although it seems like a grouping of familiar pigeons, there is nothing to suggest they even know each other, like they are all singular loners. There is a detachment to their relationships with each other. They are connected to their own shadows within a black void and are also confined by the green lines around them, keeping them to the ground in this awkward group.

Not too long ago, but on a separate timeline than the making of this painting, I had come to the realization that I have a hugely hard time making eye contact with people, and rarely do it. It just seems so intimate and my general discomfort with the world and other people gets in the way of actual sincere connection. It’s not something I’m in a rush to fix, per se, because I think it’s okay to not do a lot of eye contact, but it’s helpful to know about myself for self reflection and self improvement.

Some earlier pigeon drawings. My dad raised homing pigeons when I was a child and I love drawing and painting them.