Art Talk: What I See in my Paintings
I want to stay true to myself.
To me, that is the highest, most prioritized notion that I chase after when I am creating art. I have it constantly in the back of my mind and it’s the question my heart unconsciously asks itself as a painting shifts and evolves: Is it me?
There are paintings that have been beautiful and unique, works where I am sure others would have stopped and said that they were finished, but to me, I let it go…whether I kept going with its flow to see if it led me somewhere else or I completely blocked it out with a single color and started over again.
I try to be present as possible in my process, but it’s difficult when much of it is letting my imagination go rampant. I create stories in my head. I talk to myself in my head. I relive memories in my head, and make new ones as I go.
A lot of things go through my head when I’m painting. And that’s just the way I am with everything… even during something like a brief walk to my mailbox or listening to music. It was simply natural for it to carry over into my painting process. Yet, it’s funny because the reason my mind is the way it is now is because at one point in my life, I couldn’t bear to be myself. Or rather, I couldn’t bear living the life I was living at that point. It was a coping mechanism to me: Where I could withdraw and somehow channel my unstable, usually negative emotions into a character or world that was separate to me. Yet it was all still inside me. I created hundreds of characters doing this. A hundred different lives. A hundred different worlds. And even though it was meant to be a way to cope with the pain I felt, there was something I was constantly chasing as well during those trips my mind took.
And that was: How does this relate to me?: This world, these people, these situations? I imagine they were different people and different lives, but truly, I wanted it to all find some way back to me. I wanted to see myself in even the most distant of things, as if in doing so, I could parallel that to the real world. Telling myself maybe, I could see myself in these people around me and in this world I feel as if I don’t belong in. And if I could see myself in those things, the world wouldn’t be as scary, nor as hurtful and sometimes…not as ugly as I felt it was.
I went off on a tangent there.
But seriously. I’ve come to realize that even though I am now fairly much more happy and comfortable with myself, these habits of mine are still present. And probably will forever be present in me. And the art I create is an extension of that. Who I am. Who I was.
In my art, I am looking for me.
So that you may see me.
And I may be known – true – to me.