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.