I’m in a small room in India – West Bengal. Outside the horns are blowing like crows, attacking. People are yelling down the street, their voices drowning together, indecipherable. This is a place that envelopes me the moment I step foot outside the airport, but it challenges me, too. The sounds, the people, the food, the smells, the stories. The stories. When I listen closely through the mountainous shouts I hear cross-sections of lives; one man tells another to be…
What is the longest time you have ever spent thinking about a project? I spent the past 10 months thinking about my new series. I created other images in that time, but this new series felt too important to bang out quickly. I knew, from the moment it felt crucial to create something relevant to my life, that it was going to be more important than anything else I had created before. In March 2017 I decided that I must…
I started my career and worked completely alone for 4.5 years. It came to my attention that I was about to fall apart into a million pieces, so I hired an assistant. Things got a lot better. I felt that, while the workload was lessened a bit, the real benefit was feeling less alone. I felt like I had someone to share the failures with and the highlights, like someone really cared about my business other than me (and my…
This was a year of extreme breakthrough for me on many levels. Professionally, I learned what I don’t want to do anymore and what I want to do more of. Cosmically (sure, why not), I learned where my position is in this life and how to better ascertain that (spoiler: it’s wherever I desire it to be). Creatively, I finally brought together ideas I’ve had brewing for nearly a year (more on that later). I learned these lessons by committing…
It is so important as artists to take stock in our work, particularly to look back at what we’ve done and recognize what went well, what didn’t, and where we’re going. I’m basing a lot of my forward momentum now on intuition and a certain blind eye to what others are saying. My last blog post details that. But for now, I’m looking at this past year as a way to do three things: Critique my recent portfolio. Appreciate the…