Further 48x60

48x60 resin-coated acrylic on canvas. This canvas size requires a crate to be built for special freight shipping, around $1000-$1400 domestic. Please ask for specifics. No shipping information will be accurate at check out.  “Every single thing that has ever happened in your life has already happened, and you’re still here, balancing on one leg, staring at only yourself in the mirror, sweating in the 105-degree heat and 40% humidity. You even found parking. We’ve. All. Come. So. Far.” - My voice cracks on the last part, and for a moment, the wave of if I can carry on into the next section of the sequence of my class or not suspends in the air, filling the room. I get a grip and move on to toe stand.  The funny part about the yoga is that it’s only the best and worst parts of ourselves that we see until someday, if you’re consistent, it’s decades into the practice, and the mirror is what becomes the middle ground. None of it is bad or good; it’s just another frequency of experience and color that will make up a much larger picture.  I’ve stopped relying on my art sales to pay my bills and I painted this as a celebration of that freedom. I bet you didn’t know that I’ve always considered putting bright pink into a painting unlucky. Or that variations of orange, green and yellow are like a red light in my brain because they don’t photograph well. So much of my art process over the years became about the stress of putting the marketing and photography in front of the actual painting. Everything I did became about the results because of financial fear, validation, and the ever-elusive perception of defining what success really is.  I asked Chat GPT to tell me what my greatest fear is and it said “You feel that if you don’t produce work that everybody praises you for, you will become invisible.” That was a lot for 8am on a Tuesday, but the bot wasn’t wrong.  So I got a job. Mostly because I couldn’t stomach posting my art on social media as a product as the genocide my taxes are funding rages on. I would rather wait on people all day long than try to get someone's attention on a media platform so I can pay my electric bill without a 30% apr on my credit card. I walk 20k steps a day and absorb about 900 different experiences and frequencies every five minutes and I’ve never been more grateful in my life for a steady paycheck.  I know that I’ve lived so much and felt so much to make art out of it, but I got trapped in the survival pattern of it all. Making art and writing is what became my mirror, my home, where the drastic oscillating contrasts of light and dark found a middle ground and locked into place. The business of art was like a drug - chasing great highs of ego-driven success and a false perception of safety kept me in fear and exhausted until the next hit. I wonder often if this pattern will ever leave me.  I painted this to hang on my living room wall,  but mostly to find the version of myself that used to sit in my $600 a month apartment, painting in Las Vegas because it was all I knew how to do to pass the time. I had paint and canvas instead of food and dishes. I listened to Bedtime Story, Secret, and Deeper and Deeper by Madonna on a loop and the goal was never what the finished art was. The goal was to disappear completely, and make something out of where I went.  So anyway. It’s really nice to hit the moments where it feels like I’m suspended in air with everything I’ve ever felt because everything comes up and out onto the canvas. Back at the starting point with gratitude and clarity - back in the place my ego kept me terrified of ending up and being just fine if not happy about it - is really the only way to know how far it’s all been, and how much further there is to go.  Of course, I’ll photograph this and put a price on it, but does it matter to me if it sells? Not in the least. All that matters is that in the midst of a shattering ego death, I can still return to the middle ground and make things.