Haze

2018 - 2019

Haze is the work I was creating immediately after graduating. For a long time I actually did not want anyone to see this work, and when I did show it there weren’t many people who liked it. The work is full of hazey confusion and uncertainty and even a sort of panicked depression as I struggled to find my voice outside of art school. My only source of sanity during this time was found in the words of Kerry James Marshall

“You are barely one year out of art shcool, so what you might be experiencing are symptoms of withdrawal, not unlike those associated with mind-altering drugs. You’ve been on a bad trip, and it’s going to take a little while to connect with reality…. Art schools are like Crack dens. While inside, the environment feels cozy, everything there seems remakrable because you’re all smoking from the same pipe…. Nevertheless, you did inhale lots of bullshit and now it’s time to blow it out and rehabilitate.”

Kerry James Marshall, Letter to a Young Artist, 2006

Now looking back I see a lot of beauty in the work. I can almost see the confusion and panic of my early twenties in the quality of the brushstrokes. The work makes me think of warm red sunlight filtering through thick factory smog.