My Growth as an Artist

After a while I started realizing that the only time I wasn’t aware of my depression or anxiety, and the only time I wasn’t replaying the last few weeks I had with my mother was when I was painting.

Being a perfectionist my intentions have always been to improve with every piece I created, but something else also started happening. My paintings started to become tributes to my mother. No matter what I did in my life, she always wanted me to succeed, so with each piece, I felt like I owed it to her to keep improving. Early on in my journey I was terrified of trying to paint people which is why I started out painting nature scenes, but putting a healthy pressure on myself to grow, I made myself paint my first “person” painting. The Egyptian lady with no face. Can you  guess why she doesn’t have a face?

She doesn’t have a face because I had no idea how to paint a face.

From there I started painting bodies and became better at that, but I still wasn’t skilled enough to paint faces so I replaced the faces with Gemstones. Once I became comfortable with that I made myself paint the first face of what would be an exciting and ongoing journey. It was one tone, black outlines to help define facial features because I didn’t understand shading and highlighting. But it was growth. Which has been an ongoing theme along the way. Going from being terrified at the thought of even attempting to paint a face, to painting a flat toned, expressionless, undefined face. Subsequently, there was also something else that was happening. I was only painting on small canvases. Two things I wanted to do but was scared to do; paint on a big canvas and I wanted to paint a portrait styled painting with a defined face that had layers, and shading, and highlighting and all those things that I had felt too inexperienced to explore. One day the desire to push myself was just too strong and I went to the art supplies store and I literally bought the biggest canvas I could find. It barely fit inside my car, and even though I wanted to paint on it immediately, that 36x48 canvas sat in the corner of my room for a little over a month before I even took the plastic off.

One random night I started sketching on it, I started with some light pencil strokes and eventually I made a commitment to sketch out a face that I took a screenshot of. It took me about two weeks of sketching and convincing myself that I would lose nothing if I failed at painting it. For some reason I was petrified of “messing up.”  Even though art is something that is free…Like, you technically can’t mess up because art is free… especially in my case where I was just starting, I was doing it as a hobby, never had any intentions of anyone seeing it, so the fear of messing up is still something that confuses me (especially since it’s something I still go through). But that pressure of messing up, or that fear of not being perfect is a universal theme that is applicable in so many other areas of life in general. This is one reason why I fell I love with art in the first place. But I digress… One random day out of nowhere (and I do mean out of nowhere) the spirit hit me to just paint it. Letting go of all my fears of messing up and wasting supplies, I hopped in head first, forcing myself to evolve in that moment.

 

what ensued next was literally a blur, as if I had been suspended in time, I have no memories of the time when I was actually putting paint to canvas

 

As I was finishing up I was noticing that the painting looked NOTHING like the reference picture OR the vision I had as to what it was going to look like. My immediate feelings towards it was shame and embarrassment … Dare I say that I even hated it? How could I be happy with something that turned out nothing like what I envisioned it would? But the weirdest thing started to happen over the course of about a week. I started to grow feelings towards it. I started developing an attachment to it, I started developing empathy, and with each passing day I saw more and more ways in which that painting was a reflection of me. We had so many things in common, and before you know it, one day I woke up, looked at it, and saw just how beautiful and amazing it really is. It was now something that captivated me, as if it was a metaphor for so many things that were going on in my life in general. And it was probably in that moment that I realized just how powerful painting as an artistic medium really is.

This painting was showing me so many things about my life and about myself. As I would look at her over the course of a few days it hit me, that initial shame, and disappointment that I was feeling was also feelings of misogyny… Something that I prided myself for not being… but it was true, I was being misogynistic towards my own painting because she didn’t look how I felt she was supposed to look. She wasn’t the stereotypical example of feminine beauty that our society has put in front of us. How could I, the creator of this piece, subject her to those misogynistic feelings? That was the moment I was able to get a glimpse into just how complex it must be for women but especially black women to navigate in a society like ours. Aside from that, she represented my growth as a painter, this was by far my best painting at that time, she represented me overcoming my fear of painting on a big canvas, she represented my healing journey and ability to understand real world issues from multiple perspectives, amongst so many other things. Over the next few days of admiring whoever this woman was that had made herself known through this canvas, I realized just how in love with painting I really was. It was therapy, it was an obsession, it was the thought of possibilities that gave me a rush, such as this very moment that we’re in right now, which back then seemed like only a far fetched dream that had no possibility of actually materializing, but the thought of it was exhilarating. This online gallery is not simply an opportunity to display and make my art available to the public, it is a moment in time where we can all, both individually and collectively travel inward to identify how things we may be scared of , or things we’ve been putting off can lead to healing parts of ourselves that we never knew needed healing or parts of ourselves that we thought could never be healed in the first place. For me, each piece I create and that you see here has helped me pick up pieces of myself that I thought I had lost forever. But if you take your time to really look at each piece with patience, and from the perspective that each piece is a therapy session for a mama’s boy that lost his mom, then they will start to show you the true value in their existence and just how unlikely it is that they even exist in the first place. Each piece is a literal miracle.