Chasing the Light
I like this painting. I’m satisfied with it. I can feel my body unclench. Something that’s been rotting inside me for too long is finally out pulled from me and nailed to this surface.
Painting feels like walking straight into hell with my eyes open, chasing a flicker of light that slips away every time I reach for it. While I’m working, I’m trapped in a kind of sickness lodged in my head, my chest, my stomach like a fever with no diagnosis and no promise it will ever break. Sometimes the release hits like a snap. Other times it never comes, and I crawl out empty.
Between paintings, I feel wrong. Overloaded. Contaminated. Full of leftover noise and pressure with nowhere to go. The only time it shifts, even slightly, is while I’m painting—and even then it’s closer to an exorcism than relief.
They don’t know what it scraped out of me just to exist.
Some people numb themselves until it’s late enough to sleep without thinking. Maybe the work asks for more than they’re willing to bleed for. Maybe it does speak to them and they turn away because if they really looked, they’d have to recognize the hell in it as their own. Don’t blame me. I’m just the messenger.
I carry it. I drag it out. I pin it to the canvas so they don’t have to hold it themselves. I’m the one who gets sick over it, not them. I live with the fact that it’s made from parts of me I don’t get back.
I’m not here for nods. Meaning comes from what the work costs to make.