No small love

These are words I needed sooner that I don’t want to forget now. I wrote them thinking of myself and my work (and my attitude towards both) at around age seventeen. I struggle at times to see the point of writing anything down since I feel my perceptions are constantly changing but there are patterns that emerge and become strong convictions. I do try to hold them loosely.

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I'm grateful for you and your gifts. Even if they haven't formed in the ways you would like. Especially if they haven't. The tension you feel from those things that just want to take form through you - even if the awareness of that tension is the only evidence you have of your creative life - if you can find it in yourself, acknowledge it. The harder this is to do, the more important it is that you do it.

Your body is good. It is helpful to think of her as a person. Regardless of how you feel towards her now, any experience of love you have ever had traveled through her to get to you. Don't hate how sensitive you are or try to dull your ability to feel so that you can give more or be taken seriously. Eventually if you keep at it you will fool some and receive a modicum of respect but it will be rooted in deception and you will always know the difference. It is not worth the atrophy of your soul and it does not work - one day something small will tip the pending weight and your body will feel all of it (and this will not kill you but it will feel like it is).

When your body does revolt, don't hate her for having had enough. Don't hate the slowness of healing or the awkwardness of the work you make in grief. This is the work that has no price.

No one else knows what it feels like to live inside your body. Have enough integrity to stand by your decisions without making them someone else's responsibility, especially when you end up wrong or wronged. Your life is your own.

You don't have to try to be original. You "just" have to remember who you were before everything happened.

No one gets to be "young" for longer than anyone else.

The reason why nature is so healing is because it reminds you of the beauty of things living as exactly what they are. Seek this reminder as often as you are able. Seek it alone whenever possible.

Spending all your time trying to analyze yourself is very tiring work and you'll actually learn a lot more by focusing on ideas and projects that are a part of you but larger than yourself.

You build trust with your creative intuition when you show up for her on days you don't want to.

Be honest. It shows when you aren't.

It is actually not important at all to be understood. Please don't make your work wait on it. Curiosity is more than enough.

Just because you admire someone's work doesn't mean they can be trusted. This is less true if you also admire their life. Concerning other artists, the latter is much more important.

Emotions only last about ninety seconds in the body if you let them pass through. Resisting them only means redirecting them to a different time and location.

Pleasure is medicine. And it is your right. There are many who equate it to indulgence and want to draw lines around it for you. Don't let them. Your body knows the difference.

No one is all good or all bad. Maintaining that binary for others means you will inevitably turn it back on yourself. Don't live inside an impossible question.

There is no small love. And you can never truly lose someone.

I love you very much. I didn't always, and learning to has meant the difference between life and death. At several points you have to choose whether or not you want to be here. You can stay without living, but you'll know. Your body will tell you. She'll never stop telling you.

Painting as a lesson in impermanence

This is a note on the current series, The People We Were.

Concerning subjects and themes in art, I really only want to paint the people I love. I anchor myself in the world largely in relation to their landscapes and stories. In the beginning of 2021 I was surprised to recognize that I was creating a series of paintings heavily imbued with death, though it has been true in my life and work that certain themes appear with an unexpected urgency. I began this body of work in the context of grief, having left a faith tradition with roots reaching beyond my infancy. It has been two years and my entire life since that departure and I am still daunted by the scope of death, made necessary again and again by the time spent believing and defending a position my soul could not sustain, and by the distance the lies managed to travel, rotting and requiring so much.

A mentor of mine writes often on shedding the imagined self and the critical question of honesty in one's creative practice. It has been helpful for me to understand my work not as self defining but as a reflection of more real questions concerning self and identity. The work is almost always far less interesting to me than the conditions in which the artist made it. My work is the expression of a healing person, more specifically a person orienting themselves towards self trust for the first time. It may seem that the images are not overtly hopeful or symbolic, but I find it important to point out that the act of healing hinges upon an acknowledgement of whatever state one happens to be in when they decide they can go no further. In these scenes I have tried to imply death without naming it, and to avoid casting ideations of hope, which is a concept too large to be threatened by an acknowledgement of despair. Given the context in which they were made, it does not surprise me that these works have no sense of place. It feels appropriate to think of them in liminal or indefinite terms, as one would memories or dreams.

To render an image is to lend representation to an idea. Lend, because painting also seems to be a lesson in impermanence. When I paint, I spend hundreds of hours rendering bodies. In these hours one figure appears as thirty others on its way to itself. These shifting images teach me about humility and to maintain a position of fluidity and distance. The absurdity of painting is never lost on me and yet there is something of prayer in returning, in attending to the intricacy of skin stretched over bones and blood. If true spirituality is an understanding of our connectedness to the rest of the world, then there is nothing to be won or lost. I can start a painting over after 80 hours. I can keep on burning the illusions for as long as it takes.

The Memory Vendor

I shipped The Memory Vendor to its new home this month and have been reflecting on it for the past few weeks. I began this piece in 2017 while working in a refugee resettlement office in Akron, Ohio. It sat untouched for the better part of two years until I finished it at the end of 2019. It accompanied me in an unfinished state through several periods of transition, and even though I became frustrated with it numerous times, I knew it would be completed when it was ready to be.

I finished this painting in Los Angeles as my time working in U.S. immigration law came to a close. With each stage of this painting, the concept of freedom became increasingly more urgent. What is real freedom and who decides how it manifests in a life? Who do we consider worthy of it? What degree of freedom are we willing to confer onto others, and how does it differ from the freedom we're willing to extend to ourselves? What are the conditions behind these shifts and exchanges?

I do think real freedom is much more an internal state than a set of circumstances. This idea should never be used to justify the atrocity of limiting someone else's freedom, but rather to expand the possibility of what freedom can and can't be. For me, honesty is at least one of the conditions of freedom, and the most important thing about art is that it's honest.

Another note on hope

This latest piece remains untitled because it feels more like a one-sided conversation than a statement on a theme. I’ve been asked a few times what it means, and I don’t have a real answer for that either. Making art right now feels the way I imagine most activities do in these times, cumbersome and fragile. 

The more infallible we believe our convictions about the world to be, the farther the fall when those beliefs crumble. Not all deaths are equal, surely, and this particular point of reckoning can leave us very much blinded and rooting around in the dark. In that specific, all-encompassing vulnerability, we see whether or not the tension between hope and honesty can bear the weight of our many apprehensions, our guilts, and our fears. 

So what leads us and who can we actually trust? How do we know if it's our wounds calling us to action and not altruism as we’d like to believe? Why do we deny ourselves the perfectly acceptable starting point (maybe the only starting point) of admitting we don’t know? Can we take refuge in the physicality of the world even as we question whether or not it exists in the way we think it does? Is our base state feral, or is it love? In these times, even these questions feel small. 

But the one that seems the most urgent to me is whether we can regain trust in our bodies after long stretches of time where the most compassionate stance we can manage to adopt towards them is suspicious resignation. Maybe the question of who we can be to ourselves is the one to ask before deciding who we can be to one another. Maybe there’s not as much difference in the two as it seems.

Many thanks owed to wildlife photographer Ron Dudley, who allowed me to use one of his magpies as a reference for the bird in this piece. You can read more about him and see his work by visiting his website and blog.

October

From A Course in Miracles (1975)

1. There is no order of difficulty in miracles. One is not "harder" or "bigger" than another. They are all the same. All expressions of love are maximal. (T-1.I.1:1)

2. Miracles transcend the body. They are sudden shifts into invisibility, away from the bodily level. That is why they heal (T-1.I.17:1)

Lately, miracles look like the sporadic immersions of intuition, or the alchemy of pain becoming wisdom.

For a long time I worried about how to make something original. Now I marvel at how insane it is to think that art could arise from the need to be original.

I worry about how to be honest. I wonder what the cost will be and why I care when the alternative is to fold.

If correction is simply a question of awareness, I wonder why the process feels like a slow and excruciating burning. At times it is an unexpectedly welcome warmth, like coming inside after being out in the snow. Sometimes it is both at once.

For Someone Awakening, a Blessing

For everything under the sun there is a time.
This is the season of your awkward harvesting,
When the pain takes you where you would rather not go,

Through the white curtain of yesterdays to a place
You had forgotten you knew from the inside out;
And a time when that bitter tree was planted

That has grown always invisibly beside you
And whose branches your awakened hands
Now long to disentangle from your heart.

You are coming to see how your looking often darkened
When you should have felt safe enough to fall toward love,
How deep down your eyes were always owned by something

That faced them through a dark fester of thorns
Converting whoever came into a further figure of the wrong;
You could only see what touched you as already torn.

Now the act of seeing begins your work of mourning.
And your memory is ready to show you everything,
Having waited all these years for you to return and know.

Only you know where the casket of pain is interred.
You will have to scrape through all the layers of covering
And according to your readiness, everything will open.

May you be blessed with a wise and compassionate guide
Who can accompany you through the fear and grief
Until your heart has wept its way to your true self.

As your tears fall over that wounded place,
May they wash away your hurt and free your heart.
May your forgiveness still the hunger of the wound

So that for the first time you can walk away from that place,
Reunited with your banished heart, now healed and freed,
And feel the clear, free air bless your new face.”

― John O'Donohue, To Bless the Space Between Us: A Book of Blessings

The Tenant

I can't recall my life outside the gap

Between the end of you and the walls around us

I don't remember my body as anything other

Than this system of measure

My heart a scale, weighing the days

My feet etching circles in your charred earth

My hands outstretched, dripping with seeds

Mapping the perimeter of your pain.

April

It's probably unnecessary to look for grandiose and irrefutable explanations as to why we choose to act on certain instincts and not others. Maybe it's a symptom of religion. Or just of choosing to believe that art can do far more or far less than it really can.

I like to think there's a reason why, when describing art, religious terms are the only ones that feel large enough. It really does feel like the holiest experience and the one worthwhile act, or at least the closest thing I've found. I'm ashamed of how often I wish to be wrong about that. I want so badly to know I'm not just adding to the noise.

I still believe art can heal, but maybe it only heals the artist.

For One Who Is Exhausted, a Blessing

When the rhythm of the heart becomes hectic,
Time takes on the strain until it breaks;
Then all the unattended stress falls in
On the mind like an endless, increasing weight.

The light in the mind becomes dim.
Things you could take in your stride before
Now become laborsome events of will.

Weariness invades your spirit.
Gravity begins falling inside you,
Dragging down every bone.

The tide you never valued has gone out.
And you are marooned on unsure ground.
Something within you has closed down;
And you cannot push yourself back to life.

You have been forced to enter empty time.
The desire that drove you has relinquished.
There is nothing else to do now but rest
And patiently learn to receive the self
You have forsaken in the race of days.

At first your thinking will darken
And sadness take over like listless weather.
The flow of unwept tears will frighten you.

You have traveled too fast over false ground;
Now your soul has come to take you back.

Take refuge in your senses, open up
To all the small miracles you rushed through.

Become inclined to watch the way of rain
When it falls slow and free.

Imitate the habit of twilight,
Taking time to open the well of color
That fostered the brightness of day.

Draw alongside the silence of stone
Until its calmness can claim you.
Be excessively gentle with yourself.

Stay clear of those vexed in spirit.
Learn to linger around someone of ease
Who feels they have all the time in the world.

Gradually, you will return to yourself,
Having learned a new respect for your heart
And the joy that dwells far within slow time.

-Benedictus, John O'Donohue