empty and silent
With all the space I’ve been cultivating over the past year, I feel like I’ve lost the drive that once fueled my art. I’m actually grateful for that because eventually it would have killed me. Although I am free, now when I sit before a blank canvas, it reflects only the emptiness within me.
When I first started making things (music was the first, actually) there was a deep sense of inadequacy and need to prove that I was more than just a bag of meat with a brain. In college, when all the trauma and conditioning came rushing to the surface, I found that even when speaking felt impossible, I could fill that silence with the things I made and the things I wore. My path this past year has been about embracing the void rather than filling it. As I’ve learned to accept moments of silence, my need to prove myself as worthy to others has crumbled into dust, and subsequently, making things has become tremendously hard. I’m not sure why I started writing this at all, but maybe it will help me start to explore a new kind of creativity that isn’t bogged down by the heavy muck of this human existence.
So why did I choose making things as my escape? That one is easy. It was terribly effective at allowing the repressed voice inside of me to let it all out, albeit in a maladaptive way. I used to ask myself “If I weren’t losing my shit right now, would I still be able to make art at all?” As of right now the answer is a resounding no. It’s strange how the things we fear often manifest in one form or another. Recently, I’ve had a few experiences that have brought me face to face with those demons that used to live under my bed. Now that I’m immersed in this space, I realize that they are nothing more than trivial thoughts in an ever-shifting mind. It’s fascinating what you discover when you sit still long enough.
What does this next era of creation look like? Where the fuck will it come from? Even now that I finally have my fingers moving and my thoughts are becoming tangible, the direction seems opaque and elusive. I find myself lackadaisically meandering around form, soaked in the intangible for the time being. I’m not searching for answers or solutions, I’m simply observing this literal and figurative loss for words, something beyond anything I’ve experienced before.
Since 2020 I was making something like 25-30 paintings a year, steeped in anxiety, expectation, and a strange desire to be something more than I was at the moment. this year I think I’ve made just 4 pieces. Not to say this year hasn’t been productive — I’ve made a ton of new connections and FINALLY started showing my work publicly, which was a major hurdle for me in my professional journey as an “artist,” a term I don’t exactly identify with anymore. (see ‘more than art’)
I feel like I’m trying to articulate ideas I don’t fully understand, circling around the point like water around a drain. I’ve always been prone to impatience — yet I sit here, empty and silent, awaiting what is to come.
Being truly authentic is a tough task. From the clothes I wear to the art I make, the masks of my persona built walls to keep others out. Now, free from those masks, I feel a new sense of freedom in my vulnerability. I suppose a knight without his armor is just flesh and bone — unremarkable yet unburdened by the weight of the gilded iron he wears to battle.
