Love and Live (No Regrets).

I've been really in tune with nature these past few days; the moon has been blindingly bright in the early mornings, and at the woods today, I had a school of fish following me, as well as several butterflies and dragonflies. I wish I could have that every day.

"Self Portrait"  .................................2009

I did this piece late in the year it was done, but it was how I always wanted to feel. Now I feel it. Now I'm the living creature I've always wanted to be. And I couldn't be happier.

BOGUS.

It is the greatest feeling to shake the hand of a stranger who has eyes as dark as your imagination can fathom.

"Victims of War."  ..............................................2010

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.

"kapteeni mielipuoli ei anna armoa!"

"Changes";   ............................................................2010

I wonder to myself if anyone else out there could feel truly as alien as I feel sometimes. I do strange things that are not typical of the norm. Nothing dangerous or criminal; trivial acts such as an incessant need to wade through water when I see it, walking barefoot in school, smelling freshly cut grass or new books. I hear about people like me, read about these eccentric characters in fictional books, but I've never met someone quite like me.

I'm looked at like my skin is green if I paint on the edge of a dock, spilling shit everywhere. Even people closest to me seem to always poke fun at my habits, which doesn't really bother me, but it does make me think about this state of 'just being me'. Slowly but surely my mind is on a set expansion in my life as I bump into new people, however it's never quite the same. There's always the awkward silence between meeting conversations, driving around and watching nothing, counting the seconds until we just get the hell out of the car. I'm far too social to be silent for long.

Each person is their own individual.

But we don't seem to accept that entirely. It's awkward if someone has habits that are unusual to us.

They must be crazy.

I must be absolutely fucking nuts!