its own ineffable language, independent from and unfastened to the human constraints of definition and resolutions in meaning. In art school, the teachers and students alike desired explanations for the art I made. They had a need to know exactly what my art was or wasn’t. This approach is counterintuitive to what art is: freedom. In a world overburdened with explanation, it need not be explained, simply felt. And what I have always felt is a need for art. And consistent with my naturally commiserate relationship with art, I have always admired that it doesn’t need me in return, it just is. Unbothered by me, and there for me in all my neediness, without criticism. 

I think about the streetlights changing by themselves late into the night. With no traffic to micromanage, what is their purpose? They are programmed to go through the motions even for the emptiest of streets, so that the lonesome driver at 2:13am, who’s driving back home from the clay studio, feels some familiarity and order in the sharp but soft loneliness of the whirlwind of an empty city. I am this lonesome driver. And, once I drag my tired, bag-of-bones body to bed, I think restlessly about my purpose and what I’m programmed for just like those streetlights. 

“What do you do for a living?” is a question yearning for the clear-cut, more normalized answers like “lawyer” and “doctor”, not “artist”. On my more insecure days, what I hear wrapped inside this question, like the steaming-hot filling in a pot sticker, is “explain yourself and make it make sense to me, and while you’re at it, justify your existence to me because this question and how you answer it is who you are”. Being entrenched all my life in the never-enough-funding-for-the-arts culture of the United States, I’ve witnessed, internalized, and am hyper-sensitive to the general dismissiveness of art and ‘artist’ as a profession, and honestly more than ‘artist’ I’d say I’m a run-on sentence as a person. 

I began life in an artsy, sharp-witted college town, but one near the Great Lakes, so humbleness still abounded from all the weather torture. When my mom was nine months pregnant with me she was having her BFA show. She was an artist who couldn’t be torn away from the printmaking studio, and I know I somehow gleaned my specific creative nature directly from her. I know it’s said we create ourselves, but I am quite convinced who we are is unexplainably inevitable. If my mom had been an entirely different person, and instead had a career as a passionate lawyer or doctor, I know I wouldn’t be who I am right now. I’d be prosecuting a cult leader or performing complex brain surgery on someone, but instead I’m the one driving on the freeway excitedly yelling out the artist “John Chamberlain!” whenever I see crushed cars stacked on top of each other on the back of a big-rig truck. If anyone in earshot shoots me a perplexed look, I explain that he was a sculptor who often used old automobiles as his material. I’m innately always seeing the world as art, and sometimes as immediate reminders of specific artist’s work. 

I have a strong suspicion that even when I was a zygote I was making art. I imagine myself in gestation, sitting at my easel making work for my first nine month artist residency called ‘Artist-in-Womb’. Just picture a baby Bob Ross, perm and all, but with more of a doesn’t-form-full-sentences,“goo-goo, ga-ga” type voice, not his famously mellifluous one. The residency ended, and I was born at 5am during a waning gibbous moon, which sounds like an insult the eminently doltish Beavis and Butthead would hurl at one another: “Oh my god, don’t be such a waning gibbous Beavis!”.  

I remember, very early on, drawing at the kitchen table with my Crayola markers and a bowl of oatmeal, occasionally overloaded with delectably excessive maple syrup on the lucky days my mom would let me pour it. I’d sit there for the longest time and draw people helping each other up tall mountains. During this first series of drawings my parents were slowly ceasing to help each other up tall mountains anymore. My family and I, sans-dad, moved across the country to live in a yellow house in Maine by the water. My art-making tools at this time were still primarily Crayola markers, preferably thin-tipped. 

On a dreary day, when the forests of Maine were not filled with “happy little trees”, but instead spookily skeletal ones, with a crunchy, leaf-covered ground, I experienced a terror almost more alarming than my parent’s marital disintegration. I was walking back to our home with my brother from a neighbors’ place nearby who owned a plethora of pigs, mainly the classic pink ones. Their one pot-bellied pig somehow got loose, and came running at us like a fat, speeding bullet, knocking me to the ground and attacking me, almost eating my pinky finger off. It felt like it wanted to kill me, and it probably would’ve if my brother hadn’t been there to intervene. That would’ve been an alarming obituary: “Dead at six years old because of a mean pig”. In the aftermath of this event, with pig-created scratch marks all over my miniature, kid-sized body, my mom took me to an art store where I got my favorite, thin-tipped Crayola markers. With the new markers in my possession I breathed a sigh of relief, knowing soon I’d be drawing at the kitchen table and the whole world would fall from me for a time. Soon after this near-death experience, and after noticing a dead, cute rodent outside our front door, I finally, fully comprehended the startling existence of death for the first time. But I had my thin-tipped markers so everything was okay. Today when I see Crayola markers in a store I’m comforted by their nostalgia, but they also make me think of pigs and death. Reminiscence gets complex. 

“Have you gotten your calendar yet?” Where did the day go?” “In 30 years from now you’ll be the age your mom is now.” “10 minutes left on the oatmeal.” “6 years left to decide whether you want a kid or not, and by then it may be too late.” The endless sentiments that constantly spew forth at me in life make me feel like I’m in a time-obsessed pressure cooker that puts my mind into massive disarray. Even the more mild sentiments like “get a calendar for the new year” does this to me. The age-related, cultural expectations are especially my mental enemy. They’re why 30 years old is such a stressful age because its been built into the fabric of our being that by then you should have children and a successful career, and the further away from this you are the more you should spiral, and inevitably shit your pants in fear because failing (as defined by others) is not an option. 

The pressure-cooker of time also makes me hyper-fixate on time clicking forward, and the inevitably of death which translates to no longer being able to make art. This makes me desperately wish I was a bullfrog and didn’t sleep so I could always be making art, a tortoise named Jonathan so I could live to 192 years old and make the most art possible, or at least a shark so I could have my teeth cleaned by tiny cleaner wrasse fish, and have one less daily task distracting me from my art. I also sometimes desperately wish I was simply arboreal. On a particularly bad day, I look to anything without a brain and central nervous system and feel insatiably jealous. Daydreaming about the perfection of this kind of freedom, I close my eyes and imagine I’m a tree. 

Being able to process the full, chaotic scope of life and being fully present in the moment are important pillars of sanity that art brings to my life. Without art as my medium of survival, I’d be left a chaotic, empty shell of a person whose life would be instantaneously unbearable. Art is an imperative crutch that’s getting me through. On better days, a bionic leg. On even better days, art turns me into a timeless, powerful, undefinable entity who breathes fire like Godzilla and cannot be stopped.

All my accrued art disciplines were acquired over time out of a natural need to feel free within painful life events that felt like boxes of torturous sadness I was trapped in. Another unpleasant box I try to avoid is the one other people attempt to put me in when oddly needing to define me, as they did in art school many moons ago. Throughout my life, whenever I sense someone is trying to get box-like definitions out of me, it makes me cringe and sweat, and hopefully I forget to wear deodorant that day and my naturally abhorrent stress sweat simply scares them away and there’s no need to furiously run away. But if they caught up to me and I was cornered and asked to define myself or die, then I would have to say “multi-disciplinary artist with a sparkling personality”.