A Year of My Life I Will Never Get Back

I started painting in the Fall of 2019, freshman year of my undergraduate degree. There were visions and plans and expectations for what college– and the world – was like, and how things worked. When the world entered lockdown, those rules fell apart. As December 2019 came and went, I created the first painting in this series, Mania. Finished just before January 2020, Mania was the starting point for a year of my life I never expected. I began this series first as an exploration of self, considering the anxious compulsions I found inescapable especially in the early months of the pandemic. 

I shifted, as 2020 ebbed on, into portraying the people I saw regularly despite the circumstance; snapshots of normalcy when I was only leaving the house once a week for the bare necessities. I painted those moments, appreciating their beauty, until my partner left the country in August, followed by my closest friend soon after.

 For several months, I went without producing a work based on concept or feeling… until early March, 2020, when suddenly the painting Smoking Gun manifested in my mind and demanded execution immediately. 

Smoking Gun is a painting I made in a desperate haze, half-convinced that if I didn’t get it down in paint I might die, or disappear altogether… and in killing the “self” depicted in that painting, I escaped, somehow, from all of it, from myself. The person who entered the shower in Mania was both killed and reborn.

Mania and Smoking Gun are mirrors of each other, sandwiching between them a density of moments from a year of my life I will never get back. A year spent mostly in solitude, a year of loss, a year alone. I hope you enjoy this body of work, hidden away until now.