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My Process

Painting was not a career choice or something that I could quit doing. I tried other career paths, but I never stopped painting during my hiatuses. I’d go crazy if I weren’t in the middle of painting something. I’m always working on a study or preparing something for a show. I think I’d be painting regardless of who or what for.

I studied the atelier method throughout my foundation years. Even with academic training, art is very much a self-taught self-propelled field; one has to study art for the entirety of their life to master it. During my foundation years, I believed that art should be created without the use of modern technology.

surreal self portrait
Surreal self-portrait

What I Learned From Photography

I bought my first camera in high school as a way to take pictures of my paintings to sell on eBay. I was also an extremely anxious 20-year-old. Therefore, photography eventually became a coping mechanism, a way for me to fight my social anxiety. I used to ‘hide’ behind my camera.

After I purchased my first professional-grade camera, my camera went everywhere that I did. This way, I would have a purpose for being somewhere because I was doing something productive.

If anyone asked what my rates were, I would politely tell them that I would gladly work for beer. My Saturday night bar-hopping adventures usually involved me taking photos of beer glasses and pool tables and candid shots of locals.

Nearly every social situation involved me taking pictures of the oddest things and people. People used to ask me what I ‘do’ with all my photographs; to an outsider, the concept of taking photos non-stop seemed sort of ‘weird,’ and looking back, it definitely was. Sometimes I would tell the truth — I mostly just delete them. I do not have the disk space to save hundreds of photos every night. At the start of my photographic experience, I would only take a decent photo by accident, so deleting them became second nature. Other times I would sarcastically tell people that “I build a shrine out of them.” Questions from strangers about why I took hundreds of photos of useless things were redundant to me. I didn’t take photos for some purpose, like shrine building or an art project. I took photos as a way to provide me with a purpose when I went outside, like a pseudo-volunteer job.

Simultaneously, I was never truly ‘included’ in these social interactions. My photographic process became a way to ‘study’ the real world. I never saw myself as a photographer but as a scientist taking notes. I couldn’t even go to a concert without my camera.

Eventually, people noticed my photography and started paying me with money instead of beer.

Photography taught me the value of good composition. After you delete thousands of photos, you realize that not every picture you create is worth preserving.

How Quitting My Day Job Influenced My Process

At one point while pursuing my Bachelor's Degree, I formally renounced and dropped out of college. Then I renounced and quit my day job and joined a cooperative art gallery. I was quite the elitist. I believed that art should be created without the use of modern technology. I tried very hard not to work from photographs.

That was until I met Tom. Tom was a 70-year-old figurative oil painter who lived in his studio across the street from mine. He was in the exact same school of thought. Our favorite subject was figure painting. The thing was, Tom, had been studying art his whole life, and he was only ‘kind of’ good at it.

I remember one conversation, Tom had told me that many of the successful figurative oil painters living today worked from photographs in combination with live models (called hyper-realists) and that many of them use giant computer screens so that they can zoom into any photo and see the details, or change the contrast, or mess with the colors — and Tom made it clear that he was against this method.

I remember something that my dad told me when we went to a museum, and I made fun of an artist for using tape to paint perfect lines. He said to me, “Using tape or not using tape doesn’t really matter; what matters is the final painting.”

Eureka, Art Is Influenced By Change

Out of the fear that I would one day end up like Tom — studying an art form my whole life and never mastering it, never exploring it — I decided that it was time to start working with innovation instead of against it. This put me in a good position because I had trained for years as an atelier method painter and a photographer.

Believe it or not, there have been many innovations in painting, such as Aluminum Panels, higher-quality pigments, and acid-free materials. Even photography itself changed the way we appreciate a painting. I continued experimenting. Sometimes I staged scenes or created dioramas to work from. Little models of ships and plastic animals make excellent reference resources.

These realizations helped me understand that art is a direct reaction to a change in function. Like bacteria in a petri dish, we humans react to external stimuli in a way that produces art; changing that external stimuli changes the art we produce.

Often I use a photo or a combination of photos as a starting point. What I love about reality is that you don’t have to imagine the ridiculous; it already exists. Many of my paintings are not staged at all, in a ‘definitive moment’ kind of fashion. They're photos of strangers whom I met on the street. While others, like the painting titled "Maya G.", involved a makeup artist, a rented wardrobe, and a location.

I believe that art should be a subjective experience and that the motifs that I place within my artwork should only start the conversation.

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