I really do love cow skulls.

"Real Bad Things" ......................................................2009

Composition has never been a strong component to my work, but it is something I would like to understand. I've read a few art context and design books this summer, two of which stick out to me quite a bit for some reason, and I believe it will help me improve as time goes on. Not that my pieces have to have the perfect composition in order to be good, but it helps to be knowledgeable in various points of art.

"Real Bad Things" was a piece that I really wanted to focus on composition and theme with, and while to some extent there are small things I might like to fix now, a whole year or more later, I do think I succeeded in creating the portrait that I wanted to. This was the beginning of who I am as an artist, the very first opportunity I was given to not just express through paint, but to be who I was, regardless of a teacher's opinion of the style in which I worked. It frightens me to be critiqued by someone who either doesn't understand my work, or just decides that they hate it and will judge it based on that. I believe no matter what the style of work, regardless of my liking it or not, I can fairly critique someone, both on good and bad points.

Take for example, my love/hate relationship with Mark Rothko's work. I still do not fully understand what his work is; it's an entirely separate monster from the art that I am used to buying, seeing, etc. But despite the fact that I may not ever want a piece of his hanging on my bedroom wall, I have to give special recognition to the fact that his work does make one feel something. It just takes eyes opened a little wider than one might be comfortable with. I know I wasn't. It took me years to finally work up the gut to stare at his untitled painting, '1953-54', for a mere fifteen minutes in order to hallucinate this:

"Study - Rothko"  .........................................................2010

Though the actual piece hanging at AIC (Art Institute of Chicago) is warm and cozy, I imagined death. This heart was beating itself dry. I don't know why I saw it, but it was clearer than crystal.