Sometimes my work ends up looking like something representational, but it’s almost never intentional. I take an abstract expressionist approach to my work, meaning I don’t have a plan or a blueprint of what I want the finished piece to look like. I play around with shapes and lines without sketching out ideas beforehand. Sometimes this approach results in a lot of hours of playing around and coming up short. I almost said “a lot of hours of wasted time” but then I realized it isn’t wasted time. I spend a lot of time at play with my art, figuring out what works and what doesn’t work, but all the while I’m still creating and therefore it’s not wasted time at all. Anyway, I like to leave it up to the viewer to decide what the piece looks like in the end. What I create is purely aesthetic to me but I want it to be whatever you want it to be to you. Sometimes I don’t want to admit that, the fact that my art is purely aesthetic to me. It’s exactly like when someone asks you what your tattoo means. For some reason, to some people, it isn’t totally acceptable to get a tattoo just because you like the way it looks. I’ve run into the same issue with my art- when people come up to me at art shows and markets and ask me about my art, I try to scramble and make up something that is more meaningful than just saying “I made this because I liked how it looked.” It doesn’t take away the value of the piece or the time it took to make it to say that I don’t have a deeper meaning behind it. That’s why I like the Suprematism art movement and was so grateful to have learned about it later on in my art career. It was a relief to see a movement that validated my feelings about my own work. I didn’t have to elaborate on how my work is about my trauma, or the political state of the world, etc. etc. There are times when I do apply meaning to my work later on, though, especially when it comes to the more clearly representational stuff I used to make. I went through a phase in my art a couple years ago when I was making a lot of work that depicted the female body. I could say that those pieces are a reflection of how my body is an abstracted piece of my identity (and I do say that in an interview I did a while back, which you can read here), but the reality is that saying that feels cringe to me and I’d rather just say I made it because I wanted to and it looks great. I know I’m taking a risk by saying all this, but I hope it resonates with someone who also struggles to say things about their art in a world that craves deeper meanings when there doesn’t always have to be. I’m going to try to redeem myself now because I feel like some readers might think I came off as a jerk for saying that applying deep meanings to my art is cringe (and by “some readers” I mean me reading this back before I publish it). One of my favorite things is when people tell me what my art means or looks like to them. I’ve had several people say to me that my boob pieces (particularly Nude) really resonated with them because they are breast cancer survivors. One woman told me at an art show this year that she was going in for a mastectomy later that week and seeing my Nude print made her feel better about it, that there’s beauty in an abstracted form. I’ll counter that touching story by also saying that that same night, a man came up to my table with his son, pointed at one of my hoodies, and just said “BOOOOOBS.” Meaning is in the eye of the beholder.

Love you!