Noise

When I work on a piece very rarely do I see it all the way through, from start to finish, in one sitting. In general, I work on four or five different projects at a time — all in different stages of development. This placates my short attention span and sees that I get small shots of dopamine for completing different tasks all throughout the day. This method also guarantees that each week I complete new artworks, so I keep the wheels turning and the ideas remain fresh.

But sometimes I get stuck.

The piece above is a good example of that. And it also highlights the reward of being patient and open to anything.

At the end of 2020, my life was falling apart: my marriage, my business, my sanity. The things that I held closest to my heart were all disintegrating in front of my eyes and no matter what I did to combat it, I failed. Making things even more difficult, my marriage and my business were intertwined and when it became clear that I was going to lose both, I had a real hard time accepting it. Worse yet, I didn’t have many people I could turn to. In order to keep the business afloat I couldn’t go public with what was going on in my marriage because the business’ success was directly related to us being a couple. I came home every night wasted from the emotional roller coaster of the day.

My only remedy was to draw. Every single night I came home and drew. At the time, I was really interested in classical graphite portraiture, so I sat in front of the mirror and drew my own face over and over again.

Unsurprisingly, many of the portraits were of me screaming. Yelling. Evacuating emotion.

In this case, I had a rough self portrait sketch of me yelling, eyes closed, head pointed down; but because I didn’t think too much about composition before starting, I erroneously had the head too far towards the top of the page and it wasn’t going to look right if I continued with detail. It was just a rough pencil sketch anyway, and I didn’t know how to save it without starting over, so I tucked it under some other papers and totally forgot about it.

Fast forward two years. My divorce was final. Business sold. The universe made it clear that my life in Chicago was over and it was time to make a new start. I was packing up my things when I uncovered this sketch and when I saw it, BOOM, I immediately knew what to do with it. It just came to me, from the muse or the ether or whatever. I could feel the emotion all over again and I wanted to represent it with the black and white doodling that had already brought me so much joy. I knew that was what I needed to do.

So I did it!

The final result is something that, to me, is way more interesting than just a traditional graphite portrait. This is an ejection of toxicity! All the baggage, all the mistakes, all the angst and hurt and disgust leftover from my time of compounded misfortune were suddenly gone, into the ether, locked in to that page for all to see.

Each time I look at it I do a mental fist pump.

I made it to the other side.

It was just… a bunch of…

Noise.