04/11/2020
5 Months ago, I started a project. A project that would not only create, but destroy me as an artist; only to be rebuilt. 5 months ago, I was commissioned by a friend of mine to create a piece for her new home she’d be moving into and when I asked her what she would like to have done, she told me I could do whatever i wanted. That moment is where my inner turmoil started , That moment shook my very foundation of being an artist, because before that moment I was having restraints on even continuing to be one. Before that moment i felt life couldnt be harder and after that moment i found out it could get substantially worse. While i was searching for the piece in my head I was searching for myself, grasping at the strings of a poorly maintained creativity, my sudden realization was that my art was no longer coming from myself, my art was no longer a representation of feeling or emotion. My art became a show of force, a weapon in which allowed me to belittle and excuse and deny. A weapon that I chose to use against the very people who indentified with my true enemy; Resistance. What Steven Pressfield says in the War of Art is that “Resistance is the most toxic force on the planet. It is the root of more unhappiness than poverty, disease, and erectile dysfunction. To yield to Resistance deforms our spirit. It stunts us and makes us less than we are and were born to be.” I was stunting myself, allowing resistence to become me and my art become something else. I no longer identified with my art because I no longer identified with myself, the artist. I utilized art to reinforce an ego and an ego to reinforce art spiraling into this cycle of self-loathing and confusion. Putting myself in such a heightened position for myself and forgetting that im still on the ground. Haylee, the outstanding young lady who commissioned the piece saw that and trusted me, that was one of the things that really help me down. Talking through and sculpting the pieces very blueprints I regained some sense of what being an artist meant and the responsibility it holds to convey and to incite and inform. I want to convey beauty, therfore becoming beauty and letting it resonate through my soul.
