A Look Back

At the end of the day, all I need to know is that I’m proud of what I’ve done. Beyond all the pretentiousness of “art” and what it is and wanting to make something bigger than myself that will outlast me and legacy and all the daunting shit that it carries with it, when I look back, all I’d like is to see a collection of pieces that I am proud to have devoted some of the most important years of my life to.

I mean, it’s been five years. It’s been five years since I’ve picked up a brush and said, “okay, I’m going to figure this painting thing out.” And in addition to me starting to paint, there’s this tradition of painting Kaitlyn that I’ve seem to have unknowingly started as well. And this year, “Show Me What Love Is” is what I’ve made for our five years of being together.

I remember trying to paint her for the first time. The very first painting that I tried making of her is actually incomplete. I’m not too sure where it is now, but I would like to try and find it, to see how different it is as a whole compared to the most recent one I’ve done. I know for a fact that I followed no rules and I had no idea what I was doing. At best, it was an effort to translate my mediocre skills that I’ve been introduced to painting with acrylics for about nine months into oils. It’s the arrogance of a young artist, isn’t it? To think you can just come in, not knowing anything, and think you’re going to make something good – to disregard hundreds of years of practice and culture and technique. And to be honest, at the time, I really did think that I outdid myself and if you asked me what I thought back then, I would say it’s the greatest thing I’ve ever done. And I believed that. Even when I was wrong. But I suppose that’s the growing part that lines the road of being an artist. When we make things from the heart through and through, we’re always going to be proud of the things we make. And the same goes for every next thing that we do.

When you’ve been painting for as long as I have, you tend to figure out a lot of things. It’s what art has always been, trial and error. And I don’t just mean that by skill or technique, but style, even more so. It’s funny to look back at these old pieces and to try and bring myself back to remember what I was going through at the time and what I had going through my head. Genuinely, the last five years have been the biggest years of my life and I think you see that through my art. So within the production cycle of a painting, because it takes so long to complete a painting (sometimes it ranges from four months to a year and a half), I might have experienced the highest highs or the lowest lows during that time. It’s just funny now in general to look back in retrospect at the times when I felt like the weight of the world is on my shoulders because of things that I worried about back then. Genuinely, it’s been a bit of a tough year for me. This year, I’ve lost a lot. But I’m sure that the same will go for the things that I’m currently harboring, that one day, it would be something to look back to – not in sadness, but as a gently reminder of the way things work.

And I know that a lot of what I’ve written goes beyond this specific painting. But I just thought that the time it took to create and finish this was a good frame for the state of my life at the moment. Maybe you’d like a more in-depth breakdown of the painting instead. And to that I say, it’s coming. Because I have a lot to say about the process of this one. And I’d just like to take my time to properly word it out rather than ramble like I did just now.

Going "Viral" And What It Means To Me

The past three days have been… overwhelming, to say the least. And it’s all because I decided to make this tweet.

On the evening of October 3rd, I made a tweet showing the various paintings that I had made over the course of my girlfriend and I’s relationship because we had just celebrated a few days before. I just thought that it would be a nice way to commemorate it. So as always, I posted the tweet, forgot about it and went about my night doing whatever it is that I usually do on Sunday nights – which is probably just to put on a movie with my girlfriend and fall asleep halfway through.

And that’s when it happened. I woke up the next day without any idea of what had happened while I was asleep. I checked my phone to see that I received a message from my friend saying that my tweet was doing numbers. And it continued to do numbers for two more days, which meant that I got to see a myriad of angry girlfriends tagging their boyfriends asking them where their paintings were and a vast number of annoyed boyfriends telling me to take the tweet down because of that very reason. In addition to that, I also got a sea of people telling me that the “bar” has been raised, that I gave them hope to believe in love, that I’ve “set a new standard,” which I thought were all funny and nice. But amidst all those comments, I also got a large number of people that noticed how my paintings improved with every year.

As of this moment, as my fingers glide across my keyboard to form a catharsis of words on the computer screen, the tweet currently has 30.2K retweets and 319K likes, with about 16 million views on Twitter. And on Tik Tok, it has 876K views and 264.8K likes.

I mean… !!!! HOW!?

I know that I do not only speak for myself when I say that being an artist can often feel like our work is unseen and unappreciated. And lately, I’ve been feeling like this a lot. I believe it is a consequence when we equate our personal selves into the work that we do, and as someone that places so much of themselves into their art, it can sometimes feel disheartening when the times come when you start doubting the validity of your craft.

My friends can attest to the fact that just a few days before, I had been venting to them about feeling unseen. I remember being in bed just a few nights ago, staring at the ceiling and wishing that if it couldn’t be this one, that there was a universe in which my art could be seen and loved by many. And then this happened.

The only emotion that I can really feel is appreciation. That even though not much will come out of this, that even if it doesn’t really mean anything besides numbers at the end of the day, there was a time in my life when my paintings were seen by millions across the world.

And if a tweet was going to go viral, it couldn’t have been the most perfect one – I’m happy that they were the portraits of the person I love.

On Writing Again and Being Heard

“Time feels like it’s changed, I don’t feel the same”

It feels strange to write again. Not that I’ve ever stopped, but what I mean is to write in a more cathartic, release kind of way and not so much in a poetic way. I mentioned this somewhere not too long ago, but I miss my old Tumblr sometimes. The writing part of it at least – I used it as some kind of therapeutic place where I would just shut out the world and turn whatever it was that was brewing within me into words. And it worked. For a good few years, actually. I started it during the summer of my freshman year and continued using it until a year or two after I graduated. High school is a weird place, you experience so much within such a short window of your day but anyone that has been through it will understand, it’s just a LOT. Sensory overload. But writing everyday helped me deal with so much of what was going on, it helped me understand things better. After moving away from California, I just stopped using it for some reason. I’ll never understand, or know, the reason why I stopped using it but I believe starting painting took up so much of my time that I just never had the time anymore. At the time, I was always sad for a lot of different reasons. There was girl stuff, friend stuff, and a whole lot of other things that I was always thinking of something. But I had always hoped that I’d be so busy that I wouldn’t have time to think about things anymore and in a lot of ways, I got my wish when I started painting. Because then I really didn’t have the time to do anything else, but it was good and I loved it. Now, it’s been years and I just really miss having that therapeutic outlet again. And with this blog, obviously I wouldn’t feel so anonymous and hidden, but maybe that’s not such a bad thing. Maybe it’s actually a good thing, maybe then I would feel heard.