Images:

Process:
march2025

Artist-Type:

Discovery is an attempt to visualize my process of handling loss. Intended to be digested from left to right, to the middle. The left side represents my state of mind when first experiencing loss, the rushing thoughts, everything feels sharp, coarse and fast. And I simply cannot escape this state of mind. As I make my way up to the pinnacle of the orange circle, I have a brief moment of clarity as my thoughts begin to thin and escape from my face. I snap back to blue, where I feel comfortable and safe, it’s nice in blue, I want to stay here, I want to stay hidden with the things I know are true. But inevitably, I must leave, and as I lean into the white space, my thoughts become clear, and everything, all of a sudden, feels very real, and the distortion of thought begins to fade. Too real and too fast, so I begin to lean back into blue, but something keeps me in this white space, and so I am left there with nothing but myself and open opportunity, waiting to start again.

Blog-Type:

Out the gate, this piece means a lot to me. I wanna do a blah-blah weird-process blog post like I usually do, but I may get a little sentimental, so bear with me. This piece attempts to illustrate the state of my mental health throughout the last 3-4 months. I’ve been dealing with a form of loss, and what came with that was a great change in my life, a change that is hard to talk about clearly, so it’s difficult to convey what I’m feeling to others, but at the same time, it feels very real to me. It’s a battle between feeling very alone and wanting to retreat back to comfort while also wanting to explore these thoughts and indulge in the aching, explosive feeling that comes with loss. stuck in the middle. Maybe that doesn’t make any sense, and my writing is quite poor, but the purpose of the blog is to free-write... sooo, take it or leave it.

The process of creation on this one gave me a slap in the face and a couple of loonies. I documented everything quite well, so if you would like to pause and look at the images now, it's your chance... I started by covering up an old painting of mine that I started to spit at everytime I walked past I just covered it with a quick layer of titan white and because the painting underneath was black it left this really nice texture, it was a product of doing something fast and half-assed but hey, nothin wrong with happy accidents, which this piece is full of. I then added a strip of ultramarine blue using tape because I wanted it to be blocky, and an orange circle. I liked the look of this, and it sat for around 2 months. Then shit went left, hard times, winter, no bike, restlessness, etc., and I really needed to create, and I wanted to go big, real big, 48x48 canvas big, biggest screen in the shop big. So I stripped the canvas from the frame and threw it on the drying rack, it’s design time, baby. This went through a lot of different iterations and trying stuff out, but the great thing about canvas is that you can cover up... ooooh what a luxury. I started with laying down this gorgeous granite texture that I took from one of my photographs from a distant summer in the mountains. I wanted it to be dark red and coarse, something that captures my thought process as it dips into abstraction while logic shatters.

 This was my first time using the mega swing arm, but shockingly, I got a good layer down for the most part. The screen moved pretty badly on my second pass, so the right side looked horrific. I couldn’t stand it; I wanted to burn everything. But this simple shift of a screen opened the doors to something more, something I truly see myself in. I took a night to think about whether I should cover it up, woke up at 8, went straight to the studio, laid down a thick titan white strip, covered up the smudging, and was left with two whites that didn’t match at all. Then I was like, oh my god, you know what only works well with a stark white backing, cmyk. I really wanted to photograph a couple because I’ve never done it before, and I thought it would be an interesting experience to try and share vulnerability in a studio setting. I was lucky enough to get two great models (friends but not sure if they want to be named), and the process was just as interesting as I thought it would be, capturing a couple in poses you may only see behind closed doors is a special experience.

Ah, Im writing a lot time to wrap it. There will be more writing of what this piece actually means to me in the more refined “store” page. I can pretty confidently say this is probably my most intentional piece, everything from the distorted texture of the white to how my male model is leaning slightly to the right, back into the blue. Creating it was very strenuous but entirely worth it, also just love getting back into large printing, big emotions require big visualizations, anyway, absolute blab fest on this one.