what?

I've been making work in the last few years focusing primarily on the things I carry with me through my life: the everyday things, the burdens of sadness and anxiety and anger. The difficult to navigate and painful things that I have trouble talking about like an adult. The formless things, the uncertainty. I sometimes feel like I almost understand, but I can’t ever sort it out. I can’t ever find a satisfying explanation.

And so I paint.

A long time ago someone very important to me told me “painting isn’t fun, painting is in the blood.” At the time I thought that I understood what he meant, or at least I pretended to. I didn’t really, but I do now. I’m not painting because I think the paintings are solutions. The paintings are just my problems spooled out using animals and flowers and smoke and fire and tangled, interconnected strings.

I like to use allegories and metaphors so a viewer can take what they need from my troubles without having to have precisely the same problems. I'm being vague and esoteric intentionally, so they can hang their worries from the same tree.

When it goes right I get a taste of something so amazing it’s difficult to put into words. It’s like a slow, warm rising tide when I can push light around with color, when I can make a feather read like a feather, when smoke looks like it’s billowing out of a fire, when I can make an eye flash like an eye, when I can feel the air in the space that I just made. It’s like magic.

It’s so strong I can stop worrying about everything for just a little while, about dying, about my future, about being alone forever. There’s no creeping dread, no hopelessness, no anxiety. But then it goes away and I have to try to get there again, and again, and again.