Later Never Comes

If there is one thing I’ve learned, it’s that we give ourselves the comfort we need but like anything, too much of that will drown you. I’ve lived in the same place for about three years now, I moved back in with my Grandmother at my childhood home to pay off some bills and to help her around the house with repairs.

Turns out, I would get pretty sick and wouldn’t be able to work much for about a year in the middle. Art saved me in the form of a grant, I was given a great opportunity to sit and think and make. And I spent about half of that money on supplies that then sat for nearly six months while I worked and thought and fixed and drank and smoked and played and worked and worked and worked and paid back bills to catch up to where I started. What a process. And then I came out of the other end and realized I had spent eight months doing nothing because I always said, later.

Maybe it comes from my precocious nature or ever procrastinative one. I will make words up, don’t come at me, or do I can take it. But this is the frame right, it’s always a situation of self. As an artist, that’s the big trapping to avoid. Self narrative, insertion, idealization, but the ever presence of self. The two words have to be separated to come to any real conclusion. There is an inconsequential use of self in art, you’re always protected by your own story and therefore, can take ownership of it. Narrative, just means telling a story.

It’s silly but breaking away the self is probably what helped me the most in my third solo exhibit. It was a series of places, I was there, I lived there, there was identity that I have. And my comments on those places. But they were also their own stories. People see those paintings and recognize buildings and would tell me their own stories and how they relate to it and that was a breaking point, an understanding, a movement away from the strictest fear of commenting on other. And that’s freedom.

So I’ve had a project going, that started when I was sick, stuck in an old house that was waiting for someone to come and help fix it. Where all of the previous occupants had moved on and always told themselves “I’ll get there later.” I realized, later will never come. There is only the now.

And with that state of mind, I started making art, I had an idea at first and to tell a story about a couple of people so I started drawing from my own experiences and trying to empathize and use more and more of the external to create something that people connect to. I thought of each print as a letter to someone, as a way of saying how I view them and sometimes using literal words and sometimes using their words to describe me. But the net of this being about me was gone.

Don’t wait to say the thing. Don’t forget to set the boundary. The words may be obscured, they may be taken for a different meaning, but you will always have yourself. Even if this comes from a personal experience or it is written as a letter to a person at a time in life that is gone by, reflect only on the meaning is ascribes to you right now. Connecting the work to the author should really only go so far as they made the thing, it doesn’t comment on them.

And if you’re the artist, when you need to make the thing, make it. Don’t wait. Don’t hold onto later.