Additional Work

Outside of my more clearly delinted series of personal works, I have a handful of other paintings which were created from the need to express concepts I felt important to paint, or which were part of larger projects with other artists. Here are those collected paintings and their meanings.

Ten of Wands

A card of contradictions, the Ten of Wands begs us to parse purpose from undue burdens, the pursuit of our personal truths versus our obligations to society.

A sky burial, an exhumation of a corpse from carrion birds, illustrates this dichotomy. A life reaches death, and the death pours into life. This person once carried fire and placed it above the deceased. Now it is their turn to rest under the fire that others have brought. This static and uninhabited shell of a person will be carried on wings far above the rest of the human world.

In the pursuit of a genuine existence, you are the only person who can truly know your own limits. When should you take on more responsibilities, and when should you place limits in advocating for your own needs? Deciding what can and cannot be asked of you is to deconstruct the social scripting you inherited long ago. No matter what, the journey you're on is far bigger than you are. Any convictions followed can end certain journeys and begin others.

Despite my best intentions, I do not expect to affect positive change in places where I do not belong. As a black sheep in a culture unkind to others, my earlier efforts included meticulously cultivating my friendships, physical appearance, and social interactions in hopes of being validated by those who respected the idea of me more than the truth of me. Ironically, these earlier years also included my being unsympathetic to those outside of my worldview.

Living my truest life ultimately destroyed certain dreams of mine: old friends, family members, and certain communities no longer have room for me. As an outlier, my truths are an inconvenience to those from my past. The person I am not and the dreams that no longer fit me, they rest on the podium. Whatever leaves that stone podium is my true self. In this life and the next, I will fly far beyond where that effigy could ever have hoped to walk.

This illustration was my contribution to the Chromatic Fates Tarot Deck.

LINEFEEL: Home

LINEFEEL is about taking difficult experiences and reducing them to the simplest visual communication I can muster. This becomes a valuable skill when a situation costs so much energy that I can barely imagine creating more than a doodle. From the LINEFEEL series comes an image considerably more involved.

Today's image, Home, is about how it feels when God—a shorthand of which I'm still figuring out the specifics— speaks to me. The following artist statement was submitted to Gender Unbound, an art festival exclusively for trans and/or intersex creators. Gender Unbound commissioned my artistic response to the theme "Home", in whatever shape it took, and I'm honoured to now share it with you all.

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To render an image of home, I must reckon with many dichotomies:

My blood family is not my found family.
Following tradition is not always following my heart.
Suburban cohesion is not an ancient bond.
Childhood survival tactics won’t serve me well into adulthood.

Home, to me, is its own dichotomy. In my mind, I experience a feeling of what Home looked like, what I thought it was supposed to look like. This wasn’t the truest and deepest portrayal of the concept. As an adult, I found that Home is about feeling respected and trusted. Those deemed as Other or Less-than understand: Home is not a white upper middle class Nuclear Family. Home is not getting high marks in school. It’s not even getting your parents to like you. Home is to be yourself, unabashedly, to explore the uncertainties of your core without needing to fake confidence, and to have people that make you grateful to be on your own journey.

The dichotomy of my Home is my past and my present, the lies and the truth. Church steeples and template suburban homes force their way into the composition. In the foreground, a family affronts this hellish sprawl and thrives in spite of the chaos. They are tied by ancient bonds far greater than any social scripting.

You may purchase the canvas print with proceeds going to Gender Unbound.

Bedouin Lions

This study of the Bedouin cultures from Oman came from my desire to explore real life cultures that highlighted outfits, patterns, environmental connections, and familial dynamics that I found compelling.

Yoga Tiger

An art trade with a friend whom, until recently, denied their desire for sepia over the rainbow conventions of their usual fandom art. This personal piece was my first time trusting the furry fandom with this degree of abstract expressionist elements.

Jockstrap Tiger

In Midwest American Evangelical Christianity, there is little room for sexual expression outside of a closed and heteronormative marriage. This is also true for a desire to find yourself as sexually attractive or to appeal to others. You can find the full history and emotional processing which led to this image on my Patreon post, ‘The Fear of Being Sexy’.