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.