Why I’m making art about my love life
I would love to tell you that my mailing list subscribers are the first people who hear about my art projects, but typically, they’re about 6 months to a year behind my best friends. Since the earliest recognizable form of my art practice (circa highschool) I’ve been saying all my best ideas out loud and searching their eyes to see if that “fizzy magic” translates outside of my brain.
My friends have all the context. Never mind keeping up with alogorithms and seeing all my posts, they hear all my thoughts, see every sketch, and every state of progress that doesn’t make it online. And I swear, half of my creative energy comes from Dana, Denise, and Fatima really getting whatever it is I haven’t even made yet.
One of the other things these glorious people know every detail about: My love life. The last 3 years have been the most eventful by far. My dating app era, my not-quite-50 first dates era. Before this, I was in first one, then a second long term relationship, and that was the grand total of my dating experience. I had never gone on a first date with a relative stranger, or had anyone check the 3rd date box only because they wanted sex, or tried to figure out if I liked someone (I didn’t)… and I struggled. I actually made a spreadsheet to keep track of the people I went out with, and more importantly what I learned from each experience. Before the spreadsheet I was overwhelmed and felt like I was going in circles or just flip flopping between openness and standards, between prioritizing similarities and embracing differences. Even after, I was still confused 90% of the time.
| Name | # of Dates | Dealbreaker | Takeaway |
|---|---|---|---|
| (If I broke up with them, why? If they broke up with me, what did they say?) | What did I learn about myself and who/how I want to be in relationship with? |
And with my friends, certain stories, certain exchanges, certain people became points of gravity that pulled me back again and again to reflect on them and why they were so emotionally heavy. They became a part of my lore, and as such, creatively compelling. I started with You’ll-be-the-one-who-got-away-guy who had a different nickname before I broke up with him, but then that exchange was so memorable it was overwritten by this moniker that does not roll of the tongue. It wasn’t the most important or the most dramatic exchange I had with a date over the years, but it was the most concentrated, the most easily condensed into a single moment. And it was memorable.
So when I took photos of myself as each of my character archetypes for this artwork, and I sent them to my friends to see if the facial expressions were conveying the right emotion (I’m an artist, not an actor) they weren’t just evaluating “sad” “mad” “protective”. They were comparing the collective expression in these photos to their experience of my actual face and their actual memories of hearing this story for the first and fifth times. They understood every nuance and how it related to every other story and to the current state of my love life.
And when I wrote the poetry that hides inside of the print, and titled it in a violently self-deprecating manner, my friends were there to reassure me that I was not being overly dramatic or sympathy-seeking (it is exhausting sometimes, not the creating, but the self-editing). Occasionally, I’m lucky and one of my friends will point out something I’ve put in the art completely by accident.
I don’t know if anyone who doesn’t already know these stories will feel the artwork in this series like my friends, but I do know that the specificity makes them conversely more relatable. And I know that my love life will not be an infinite well of inspiration but it is deeply relevant to my experience of the world and interpersonal relationships in this moment. I tend to flow from one creative theme to another, spending a year here, two years there. If I get to be romantically happy next, that sounds great. I’ll make a few artworks about it and move on to whatever emotional experience is compelling after that.
The Bitch Who Broke His Heart 12x16” linocut 2024
