Self-Portraits in Quarantine
Some strange self-portraits up in here.
I don't know about you, but as this quarantine lingers on, I go back and forth between wanting to get shit done and wanting to chill out, take a nap, and eat a crap-load of wheat thins. I'm trying to dramatically lower my expectations of myself during this time and boy is that hard.
One universal truth I've learned from years of art-making is that the second you put heavy expectations on something, it all goes to shit. In order to continue to want to make things (whatever those things may be) you have to detach yourself from the end result. This means that no matter how awesome or shitty the work comes out, you still want to make art. And you still like yourself at the end of the day.
In this moment, I'm not expecting my art to do anything profound. I'm not working on an ambitious project or against an important deadline. I don't expect myself to translate this experience into a 'great work of art.' I'm purely using my creativity to stay sane and feel normal. To process and get through this shit-storm.
This has looked like a lot of different things these days. It's involved me making a book that celebrates the life of my grandmother who died last week. Since my family couldn't gather to process the loss, making a book felt like another way I could facilitate a gathering. It was cathartic for my family to share their memories of her and cathartic for me to bind them into something beautiful.
The last few weeks have also involved me making some wacky self-portraits, recording silly voice-memos in my closet (is it a podcast? who knows), and sitting with all my art books in a pile. Btw, this is all happening while I'm in my pajamas, which I fully endorse....
Mostly, I'm trying to make things not because I have expectations of those things to perform in some way, but because making them makes me feel good. In other words, I'm trying to let my art be in service to my life. Because hey, that's good enough for now.
Cheers to good enough, y'all.
An artist book for my grandmother, Rose, who died the morning after her 93rd birthday.