Written late July 2025 — posting with no edits as of now…just trying to put some some signs of life out in the World Wide Web…

​

It is hard to believe that its been almost ten years since I started paiting in college. A lot has changed since then, in my art and personal life, but one thing has stayed the same: the search for meaning, and the need to create meaning. Creating has always helped me make sense of the world, whether it be though writing, painting, or taking my camera out to explore and just paying attention. Although I’ve taken a break from painting over this past year and a half since moving to New Orleans, I have not taken a break from creating. I have clung to writing more, and finding other ways to be creative even if mundane, as so much in my life was shifting. As I’ve retunred back to painting, I wanted to take a little time to put something together for custom pieces, the process, and how I see it as a collaboration between two artists, even if you don’t see yourself as one. Everyone creates in their lives, and is committed to some form of artistry whether they realize it or not. I believe to be creative it simply to be intentional, to pay attention, and to commit to ways of expressing what we’ve experienced through paying attention.

Creating a custom place is always a dance between what inspires you and what inspires me, and ultimately it is extremely meaningful that the art that comes through me is something that inspires you. As I’ve opened the world of painting back up, I know that the person that approaches the canvas now is not the same person as when I first began a decade ago. What inspires me now though, hasn’t necessarily changed, but has expanded and evolved – like a seed to a flower, from a flower to a tree, from a tree to a forest. I’ve been wondering, and quite honestly wrestling with how I will tell that story now. While the words are always a work in progress, what is a relief about painting is that it is in no need of words, just doing. To begin just needs my presence and paint. And my presence in the present moment always brings me to a mirror. This mirror not only allows me to see who I am now but asks me to see my reflection through the art of remembering. The art of remembering is over time, fine-tuned to know what memories to retrace, even some if some are painful, to process in the present. Once processed, the past is now in the present moment, allowing it to be understood, and through understanding I am now able to be more fully in the present moment. The present moment then becomes possibility, it asks the question, in simple terms: what will I create? 

Which is a question, once expanded, asks:

How will express my inner world? How will the outer world be expressed through me? 

The process of remembering is very much an internal one. For me, I feel remembering is the vessel, it’s the ship by which I can travel my inner world to reach the outer world, but this destination doesn’t mean moving to the outer world, it is some place in between. The inner world, I feel, for the soul, is the Great River. This brings me to, the past two years. 

Self-expression, to make yourself known, doesn’t always mean sharing everything created. Self-expression is ultimately the art of making yourself and whether or not it is shared with no one, a few, or the masses, is secondary. 

If who I am is a collection of experiences (memories of the past)…how will memory be expressed through me in the present?

So all at once, the past is in the present, I am in the present moment, and therefore the present moment becomes possibility, and no longer a rehearsal of the past. People rehearse their wounds the most, this is the cost of not remembering, of not pausing to process. This is, I wonder, the most important forms of artistry for us, as humans. To remember our own history, and ultimately the humanities history, the collective history. Moving forward as whole. 

This mirror has been foggy at certain times in my life, causing me to feel a forgotten sense of meaning, who I am, which ultimately runs the river of creativity dry, the same river that allowed me to see my reflection in the first place. There has often been a sense of resentment, when certain channels of my creativity feel cut or paused, it can cause me to feel lost and act lost, when I close my eyes to imagine this feeling, I am immediately in the middle of nowhere, a dirt road below me and miles and miles of land and empty fields all around me. 

This moment of imagining, has in real time as I’m writing, created a epiphany: that imagery, the “middle of nowhere” place, is where I am from. It is the only place that forces a story out of me. It is the only place that removes every influence, every building, every person, so that all that’s left is the land and my mind. I have spent some time searching this places, pacing the fields and roads to find some sense of place, some person to tell me the way, the meaning. But through some kind of cosmic grace, a bolt of lightning strikes next to me, sending electricity through the fields and their roots and through my roots, from my toes and feet that have taken me every place I’ve ever been and it continues it electricity all the way up until it illuminates my mind, which allows my see the past and most importantly, understand the present. For me, and I believe for all of us, it has to go this way, from toes to mind, from past to present. The present cannot be understood, cannot be illuminated without first entering through the toes, the past. It comes from the toes because this is our physical roots, because the toes, our roots are in motion are closest to the physical ground, land, the root all places, the foundation of all nature. Understamding has to come from this physical connection, of my toes and earth toes meeting, learning to express myself while watching the world express itself. I can experience, and I can remember all places from this middle of nowhere place, where 

but that asks me to practice the art of remembering: who have I been, my experiences, and where are the synchronicities and themes that I can use to create imagery, to add color, and ultimately through expression comes the ultimate thing that needs to be expressed: our ever evolving stories.