After Every Low...

The art world is just like waves of energy and inspiration going up and down. Sometimes you can feel unstoppable, full of creativity and energy. At other times you can feel like someone punched you in the stomach and you just want to crawl under the covers and not come out. After every low is a high even if it doesn’t seem like that.

I’ve been through a major artist block where I got to the limit to where I was rethinking my role as an artist, thinking… do I really want this for my life? What will it change? Sometimes I feel selfish for creating art, when in the world there are such tragedies. I feel so insignificant… always thinking about how can art help better humanity and change the way we view life. Does it make someone happy? Sad? Is it political? Is it classical? Does it say something or not?

What I came up with for this moment in time is, if we want to make things in this world better we have to correct our lives first. Start small and go from there. If we are “messed up in our heads how can we help others”. I started working on artworks which release anxieties within. For the first time I painted myself, it was a liberating yet scary experience. The paintings were huge and overwhelming, the colors are used would hit the viewer at first glance, although they show pain it is not clear what the pain is. I myself know what I am referring to yet the people who come to view the work don’t know. I still don’t know if I want to reveal where the pain comes from. For now I will just call it”a build up of traumatic experiences”

I needed to go through that experience, it was as if I took out the feelings from my heart and put them right in front of me, it was the way I dealt with them. It felt liberating, yet in the beginning it was sad and frightening.

Music I played in the studio while working helped me with the energy and the brushstrokes! I kept moving from one canvas to another and then back again. From time to time you hit a plateau and that’s when you have to challenge yourself to do more, to think in ways you never thought. The plateau is a scary place, when it comes it brings the block with it. Now I know that when I come to that place in my work I have to experiment and talk about what I am doing with people so I can move forward.

Hopefully I will push myself more and more this summer; I want to explore area’s I have not explored. Think in way I have never thought. Interact with new and interesting people who come from completely different worlds with different ideology, perhaps this will push me to a new direction in my work and might make me see people and the world from another perspective.