2024 winds to a close

I’m sitting here at my kitchen island on New Year’s Eve, listening to the new Mount Eerie album, reflecting on the past 12 months. A lot has changed in my life: new love, another move to another Florida location, another museum job, 1 more album and 10 more paintings made, 3 more sketchbooks shelved. This year has been about sustainable change — good relationships made, a job that feels right, no more alcohol and a healthy and consistent studio practice. The gears are unrusted and the paintings are fully back. My work has taken a turn to the human figure and narratively driven moments, an image of the pieces of a larger whole, short moments expanded on by being created into the infinite and long-living canvas. The paintings show a part of the whole, but the part of the whole is also whole. There is no beginning and there is no end, only the space in-between, in which life is lived, and these paintings operate. I’m excited to see what 2025 holds. I’m excited to keep going. A few things that I haven’t mentioned:

This
And Also This

The first is a song my family and I made about my grandpa. It’s sweet and is sort-of a retrospect on his early-life and a look at the echo his life has created in his children and children’s children. The second is a ready-made Christmas album thing, a tape recording of my mom, aunts and uncles, grandma and grandpa, on a pre-christmas day in 1982, playing around with instruments and singing songs, etc. It’s a strange little bit of nostalgia. Remembering a memory that isn’t there for you or I.

Anyway, I hope you and your people have a great start to the new year. I’m sending love and patience and wishes for success to the universe. Hopefully the answered wishes will find me, but perhaps they will also find you too. 2024 was a year of growth and formation, a year that I’ll look back on years later. Like a rock weathered by time, the sun is shining on me, the weather lulls for a breath before the next cloud, sunray, or rain comes. Wishing you peace and love and a happy new year.

12/31/24

Study for a Florida “tiki bar on site” advertising motel, and the feeling of taking your girlfriend there while she has strep-throat. Is she hesitant at the door, or only waiting for you? What is beyond the second floor motel door is left unanswered. The stairs lead up-down, an unreliable narrator present. The paint is playful, applied intuitively, the night is abstract. The image contains a haunted aspect as well - only by nature of the composition and figure placement, which is only captured from reality totally candid. But something about the figure turned around, the harsh light of camera flash, the shadow of the viewer casting up the stairs, the tension leading you to the figure, it reminds me of a shot from a horror movie (VHS? Blair Witch? something like that). I like the glowing romantic stars. We are very much in love. Maybe this painting is about that. About being totally in love and having weird nights together. I see the work of Mark Tennant in this piece but am unsure as to why I see him in this work specifically. He definitely was an influence for a time, but not so much anymore. I do find his works to be ethereal and full of this uncanny energy, this young-type-romantic energy. Maybe that is what I’m seeing here. The truth is the image found me again — another kodak snapped moment. The disposable capturing a moment of tension and love in the air, candid, truthful. The wind blowing through the blue painted handrails, twenty-seven in Sarasota, Florida, past midnight, cars bleeding by in the dark, your girlfriend just above you awaiting the inside of this Golden Host Resort, you have a job interview tomorrow at another art museum, you are getting older, your life is changing again.

12/14/24

A floating sentinel at rest as the world around it encompasses everything outside of it. Focusing on stillness here — the animal’s the voyeur, the story is outside of the image, the swan floats without much relation. I’ve noticed myself appreciating animals more in paintings recently (note: Rosa Bonheur’s cows and deer, Francis Bacon’s dogs and monkeys) and wanted to test my hand at it — I’ve always found painted animals to be quite telling about the artist in general. If you can paint animals and avoid the sentimentality, the sweetness and story-book, the realism even, and convey their state of being in stead, this usually means you’re a quite good artist. My favorite artists paint animals well. This may be the first animal I’ve painted seriously? The image comes from a Kodak snapped swan on the ground in NYC this May. In the photo the swan was walking and honking and being looked at by people. This painting is not that photo, but I referenced that photo to capture the swan and the light on the swan in the painting. Swans are less elegant in reality, and I thought “why not capture their loud candid nature through paint?”, but eventually settled on the idealized. Why expose swans for not being beautiful? No one cares. The image was not supposed to be about that. So anyway, here is this swan, idealized and still and floating and watching your world unfold.

12/14/24

Close to the ground, rounding the corner on the Cassadaga street, maybe drunk back then, figure caught eclipsing the streetlight glow. I believe this was shot at the same streetlight as the one featured on the Big Best Friend “EMPTINESSES” album cover. This small spiritualist community in central Florida has become a place of many memories for my friends and I over the years. I’m very compelled by it, the possible vortex that may (or may not) beckon the nearly perfect Florida weather, available stars, picturesque sights, fewer bugs, talking owls, good times, etc. I found this photo in my phone from a year or two back. I like the out of focus approaching shaded figure, the solid grey night sky, the residential nature married to the unease, a suburban disturbance. The bars on top and bottom are me playing with Aspect Ratio, cinematic tendencies put through the filter of paint (and painting’s history and baggage). The image’s artifice reflecting on itself. The image is framed like a movie. I think there may be something there.

12/14/24

On the evening before Hurricane Milton’s touchdown, old friends, my sister, my partner and I threw my father’s ninja throwing stars at a printed out photo of the hurricane-eye nailed to a blackjack oak tree in my parent’s front yard. One of those sweet memories I recognized while making it. This painting is based on a photo taken at that time, phone camera in the hands of Clark Levi, partner of my longtime homie Josh Thomas. Life feels less fleeting when around loved ones for the fault of pollution and weather. There is something beautiful in Florida skies before record-breaking storms, something I assume most Florida-natives recognize. This painting is that, ode to the seasonal storm that hurries up everyone into frenzies to evacuate and clog the interstate. Painted over the course of two weeks, a little slower than usual for the smaller canvas size. A bit blurred, not over-painted, earnest in its size and meaning. Thinking I’ll make a handmade frame for this one.

11/11/24

In the beaming headlights of my Subaru Forester, the overgrown plants in front of my old condo door blew into heavy shadows over the faded white and pink — it was beautiful. It was a photo lost to time, buried in the long finger-scroll gallery of my iPhone. I found it sometime after moving from Naples, Florida. The photo held some kind of poetry, the irregular composition was intriguing, the under-thought quick photo-snap held multitudes that compelled me to explore. It felt about time passing, about the complexity behind each home-front-door, about being unwelcome in a place of the past. Something about this weird hauntedness in the glowing light of a car, an old door seen like a specimen. It just felt recontextualized in an eerie way.

This whole painting process was very intuitive, from selecting the image to the actual paint application. It was painted wet on wet, in a matter of days. Most of the painting was done in one sitting. This painting is on top of another unfinished painting — a self-portrait of myself on my 27th birthday, abandoned, buried under the paint, myself behind the apartment door. Weird poetics buried in unseen double-exposures, that is this painting.

11/11/24

Here is a large ambitious painting featuring the long-time figure-reference (and bestie) Brent Matheny’s reflection caught in a window of a speeding train car. From a candid photo shot in NYC this summer on a disposable camera. The past couple of months I’ve been working at a very quick rate, burning through a roll of canvas in just under two months. This piece took about three weeks to complete, working in the negative space of two Florida hurricanes. You can see pretty in-depth videos of key sessions captured as time-lapses and posted to my social media(s) (link in bottom right corner).

This piece feels like a notable one — it’s a shift in mood and in exploration but the subject stays the same: impermanence, transience, voyeurism. The wheel turning, the world rolling, blurred in a fog the viewer is hesitant to engage. The world performs, we are on its stage trying to remember our role. I like that this painting has brought about daylight. A reflected landscape caught in the mirror of mechanical construction. It begins conversations about the actual modern world we live in, (while I feel most of my work disassociates with most man-made things, this painting embraces them) confronting the viewer with the solid, heavy, rusted people-movers. Something some of us live with on a daily bases. That reflected train wall still contains the same repurposed perspective a pond can reflect in tranquility. Shifted perspectives can be found flashing in any state. Note: The figure is not inside the car, but reflected outside of it, not moving but watching the movement. The figure is fixed in contemplation in the bottom right of the canvas. The viewer (you) is fixed outside of here somewhere, chewing on their cheek, contemplating art, their commute, their future grocery lists, the universe, I hope.

11/11/24

This is a heavy one. I think that this is the most “personal” piece I’ve made since being an adult, or semi-adult, certainly the most personal work you will find on this website painting-wise. This is an image of the view outside of the college hangout spot, my boy Kennedy’s apartment. His residence has been a point of inspiration over the years (reference: Apartment #9, Streetlight Underwater, Impermanence 1-3, the WWGTE song Shimmer, etc), as it was the actual location of my coming-of-age moments. Surviving my first heartbreak with his help, drinking wine and smoking cigarettes and leaving a piano in the bed of his truck for a whole summer and drunkenly playing it late into the night [insert long overdue apology to the neighbors here]. Every night we would drink our cheap wine, him Cabernet and me Merlot (there were times when painting this that I swear I could smell it), and star gaze and contemplate our existence on earth, everything burning with meaning and significance; and there was this streetlight that sat right in the middle of our skyline. Pooling down on us like this dramatic other-worldly stage light. Over the years streetlights have taken on this meaning to me, this representation of young adult emotionality, coming-of-age nights and romanticism. So here is this painting, another “portrait” if you will, of our views, of our life 2017-2018. Something that was, that has come and gone.

Kennedy is no longer with us, he passed on Halloween, 2022. He was one of my best friends, one of only a couple of people who hold spots like that in my heart. I miss him everyday. I wanted to include him in this series of portraits, this series of anchors in my life, people I love. I knew I didn’t want to paint his portrait, it felt disrespectful to his memory to transform him into paint or something. It felt not like something I would do. He isn’t here anymore, but his memory is, the feeling of the thing, blurred out, foggy, this view of this streetlight that used to hold both of our eyes.

9/27/24

Continuing this series of portraits, I believe this will be the last literal one for now. Painted between May and August 2024 — The figure is receding into the darkness, framed by the window letting in the midnight. This is a study of the long nights when in new love, blurred vision as it always is when adjusting to darkness, the way the body becomes impressionistic without any lights on. The color palette is a return to the nocturnes of the previous years. Moving the paint around until the image reveals. This piece is a container, what will you bring to it? What eyes will you meet when the shaded figure meets yours?

9/27/24

First sketched on Christmas vacation, 2023. I finished this piece a few weeks back and am just now having a good chance to post it. This painting was made with acrylic and oil, the latter atop the former. I like the way the figures notice you. The way the viewer becomes an unwelcome presence. It captures a moment of reaction, immediacy and vulnerability in the same room before one floods out the window. It reminds me of that one scene in The Shining, you know the one. This painting took a while to resolve — for the painting to be happy it required some weird decision making: the black of the background, the blue of the chair, the overall purple. It lives in a coolness, the background a flatness, the illusion dismantling, the room collapses as your eyes meet the painting’s. The figures painted are Brent Matheny and Josh Thomas (besties), thank you to them forever and always. Embrace vulnerability, sit on your friends.

I’m on a plane now, flying to Atlanta from Kansas City, then from Atlanta to Ft. Myers, then the next day to New York. Life will, for two weeks, become a blur of cities and art. I’m fortunate to be able embrace the bigness of the world easily traveled. New things have grabbed me recently, spending every day’s end looking at the sunset over a pond or beach. Big feelings boiling, life has found a lot of significant months lately. Nothing has slowed since Christmas. Big things, feelings, creativity at all times. I need to get back to the painting studio (only studio and also bedroom), but I have been burning through sketchbook pages recently. More things to come. Go outside and sweat or shiver, it’s that time of year depending on where you are. Till next time, website.

5/18/24

New song above: a favorite song from a favorite band now made by myself. Adrian Orange and their band Thanksgiving has been a favorite of mine for some years now, but since the new year they’ve become a bit more reflective of my thoughts and feelings. If I’m a monkey, Thanksgiving is the human behind the window I’m pointing to. Enjoy. Maybe check out the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. But please don’t drink too much wine. Please mediate and sit silently.

4/13/24

PRAISE HEALTH (THE SHORT FILM) OUT NOW!

PRAISE HEALTH (THE SHORT FILM) TRAILER OUT NOW! FULL PROJECT STREAMING ON YOUTUBE 04/05/2024

PRAISE HEALTH out now, streaming everywhere

It is 12:48 AM on March 1st, 2024. This album was completely written and recorded in January of this year. It feels like a weight off my shoulders to have this thing in the world, things that needed to be said into the big universe, energy manifested and released, healing cycle reaching the (not)end and beginning another, catching its tail. Every album I have made is special to me, but I absolutely believe this to be the most earnest, helpful, and useful. In trying times the camera zooms out and a larger perspective is revealed, with these new visions I can point to the where and why of both the hurting and the healing. Criss cross on the floor as a puddle I made this album that attempts to shed baggage and accept the constant living moment, in all of its bittersweetness. Okay, I’m sleepy and should go to bed.

I think the record label that is publishing this album said it best when they said about it “a mental health moment that ensures safety in its presence.” This is exactly what making this album was to me, and all I could ever hope it to be for someone else. I love you all.

Please stream the album anywhere, Spotify the name “We Will Get There Eventually,” etc., or stream HERE on my bandcamp.

Please order a beautiful tape HERE from the always amazing and supportive Blade Records, thank you for the kind words, (other, not previously painted) Josh. Reader, also consider checking out his (head of the record label Blade Records, Josh’s) band, The Maples.

3/1/24

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You’ve Been and Crooked Tree now streaming everywhere

Hello all, I have 2 new songs out today and I hope you give them a listen. The past couple of years have been rather trying: fresh out of college adopting a full time job, experiencing loss and then deep loss, the death of a very loved and close friend, getting sober (lasted 8 months) after about 7 years of heavy drinking, and now more recently the conclusion of a 4 year relationship at the end of 2023, slipping on my sobriety and then finally getting sober again (about 2 months clean as I’m writing this). It has all been very heavy. Experiencing a sort-of coming of age always that evolves with my continued living. This all to say, I spent this January writing, recording, producing, and performing an entire new album. Out of nowhere Big Creativity tends to flash within me when experiencing bad times. The album that these songs are from is called “PRAISE HEALTH” and it is out a week from today, 3/1/24.

Every time I finish a new album it immediately becomes very special to me and kind of my favorite album of mine. This one in particular occupies a unique space — this is the first album of mine ever written and recorded completely sober. This is the quickest I’ve ever written/recorded an album (it all came falling out close to full formed). This is the first album of mine that I considered not releasing due to its deeply confessional, diaristic, almost without-metaphor lyrics. It is not intended to really be jammed to, it is more the result of me attempting to stay living during a trying time. These songs are me singing to myself the things I needed to hear and needed to believe. This is the sound of me healing (not being dramatic, that is what this is). In the past I’ve handled heart-break with a biting-reaction, lovesick and spiteful songs. This is not that. This is the opposite of that. This is embracing the real bittersweetness, not blocking anything out, singing the conclusion of this very deeply felt love. A picture of the moment of impact, the image of a deeply loved person dissolving quickly and out of nowhere into both silence and noise. I also think I’m becoming a buddhist. Anyway, all love, may your heart break in blinding light.

Stream the songs on Spotify HERE, stream (and/or purchase) the songs on Bandcamp HERE, and you can find it pretty much everywhere else too.

2/23/24

Starting my 2024 with a bizarre and tragic reminder of uncertainty, I find myself grasping at the world around me, through music-making and paint-painting. Like always, blindsided heartbreak produces art things. This is my first painting in almost two years. It truly is wild how much faster time has been moving these past couple of years. Full time art-handling gives little time for art-making. But now, finally I’m finding myself in my small pockets of time away from work creating things steadily again. This above painting, “Parent House Moon,” finds me eluding my own self-portrait. Pointing to a friend in stead, saying “examine him,” not me. Josh Thomas is the figure I’m pointing to, a talented screen-writer, play producer and film maker (and also sort-of secret poet and musician), and one of my closest friends, find some of his work HERE. This image was based off of a photo of the two of us from a couple of years back (minus the moon and My Bloody Valentine hoodie). I’m finding myself more drawn to figures lately, finding something compelling about their aliveness, about our shared experience of being and looking human, in 2024, clutching our iPhones waiting to be turned into a painting, undrunk in black night, meaning something. I’ll plan to explore the figure for a little bit, before I’m sure I’ll return to the open landscape, available for introspection and whatever the viewer brings to it.

Beyond this, look forward to a new album and another new album later (Morgan makes shoe gaze??) and plenty of more steady paintings. I love you and thank you for being supportive and interested.

2/18/24

We Will Get There Eventually tapes available now through my Bandcamp! CLICK HERE to order one and I will go to the post office and send it to you! I’m happy to sign them, please just ask me to when you place your order!

2/10/24

WE WILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY - FROM THE TORRENTIAL SNOWS OF FLORIDA (OUT NOW)

All songs written, recorded, and produced by Morgan Motes, except the Smells Like a Sailor verse (Little Tombstones) and Bird Eat Bird verse (I Forgive You, Gainesville). Recorded in the bedroom and studio in Naples Florida, Early 2022 - Mid 2023. This is the definitive Morgan Motes album. Stream Now, available on all major streaming services.

released October 27, 2023

Additional vocals on "Like Anyone" by Silvana Smith. Featuring the voices and claps of Brent Matheny, Josh Thomas, Scott Thomas, Mom, Dad, and Grandpa. Thank you Bird, thank you Sailor.

I think of this album as my musical self-portrait, a welded together vision of where I'm from and what I am, set against the terror of 2020s Florida weather. The album began to take its full form after seeing the aftermath of Hurricane Ian from the grounds of Naples, Florida. Wind swept and sideways rain, water to the doors of cars, fish everywhere. From the Torrential Snows of Florida found me in tight spaces, on weekends away from work, grappling with grief, separation and too many drinks. Mid-twenties uncertainty, post-college, thinking what it may be like if my life flashed before my eyes. Thinking about what it means to have only lived all over Florida in all of my 26 years. I'm six months sober now and things are better. Thank you very much for listening.

WE WILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY - IF I WERE A FISH

WE WILL GET THERE EVENTUALLY - PHONE TAG

Stream everywhere now! More news to come, From the Torrential Snows of Florida —

New show 9/8/22 featuring 4 paintings by myself and many other works by other great artists! Shouts out Michael Everett, he was my high school art teacher and 100% set me on the path of taking art-making seriously. Venture into my home town and look at my work on the walls of the place I went to college before UNF. Florida School of the Arts, Palatka, Florida. Very happy to be included in this!

Knowing only that I’m from Earth, I am in the woods at night and at peace. Actually though, it’s too hot in Naples, Florida, to do anything and there are no good, untouched woods that I can walk to, and if there were, wouldn’t at times I want to go into them with another person? I miss my friends and family. So I stay inside, not paint or paint, pretend to be Francis Bacon, feel poorly. I always try to not include figures in my paintings as to give the viewer nothing to latch onto that feels human, feels like them. Without a human in a painting, there is an opportunity for free evaluation, meditation, thought. But I must do things differently sometimes. So here is this painting, “World With Human.” I wriggle in the absence of everything that once was. Cheers into the howling chest of night, aggravated by the too many and too expensive palm trees that pervade it, and meaninglessness. I painted a human shape in my imagined woods, being.

06/04/22

Happy Halloween! Surprise! “Moonlighting” by We Will Get There Eventually, and “In Landscapes” by Big Best Friend are out now! Click on the above images! Become my own ears and hear what songs sound like as they’re on their way to passing the line of being releasable or “finished!”

Love,
Morgan Motes, AKA BBF, WWGTE
10/31/21

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EMPTINESSES out now!

Bandcamp HERE
Order a tape HERE
also available on all major streaming services

Check out three live performances of songs from the album below:

New album “EMPTINESSES” out June 18th through Blade Records, music video for “Somewhere Invisible” below —

Written / Recorded September 2019 - May 2021. With the making of this album spanning so much time (more than ever before), it captures growing pains: love, more death, and COVID. In a flare of fast living, this album captures many landmarks that I'll be thinking about for years to come. Opening my arms to change. A study of things missing and memory. Coping with the human condition.

Study for Emptiness /// [BLOG: CRIT 3]

This series explores isolation and emptiness through the vehicle of landscape. The images are apprehensive to clue the viewer in on the world that they depict, and through their ambiguity, they create a separation between the viewer and the image (a thing lost in translation). The viewer is then left to cope with what they’re looking at. In this way, meaning can be discerned. The representational aspects of these images are held by a border. An emptiness surrounding what’s translatable (the image separates itself from itself). This is a reminder of the artist’s presence, a nod to the performative act of painting. These images are self-aware and know the guilt of their own artifice. Abstracted text appears in small areas of these paintings. The text itself is visually indeterminate and is to be more interpreted through the words’ connotations than the words themselves. It is more about the feeling of the thing — how an old poem may be remembered, abstracted by memory. Symbols are utilized as well, interior items implying isolation (lamps, empty containers, beds, windows, etc). When all of these aspects tangle, they reveal a complicated relationship manifesting as the image itself. The final image operates fully as a representation of the complexity (we live nuanced lives), overstimulation (the internet will kill you), and real (funny) sadness of the contemporary moment. In COVID-World, I find myself focusing on one thing: emptiness.

I think that I’ve learned quite a lot about what emptiness means by exploring it in this series. The most valuable rumination being that emptiness is invented and doesn’t exist without being intentionally made. There is no emptiness in the real (wild) world — it’s a thing that through the human condition we invent and project (maybe). This series may be more closely related to coping than anything. It’s an attempt to grapple with big death and isolation, how it feels to stay inside looking through the window for a year. It’s an observation of the untouchable landscape. Melancholy, brooding, kicking my socks off to put my slippers on and lay in bed. Empty is what I feel about this all. Emptiness is the long conclusion I’ve came to in my long boring cope. The world is menacing, look at the water.

Follow-up and a Question Answered /// [BLOG: CRIT 3]

All of this work (Study for Emptiness 5-8) was made Mar 3rd, 2021 — Apr 4th, 2021. See some of the sketches and a reference image for these pantings below.

What successes did you have with the work?

I think that I’ve done a decent enough job of doing what I set out to do: explore emptiness and the way that the perception of the landscape has changed since the COVID-19 Pandemic. This series has really consumed my mind since I’ve been working on it. The landscape has become estranged from me through my estranging it. I don’t know. This series does seem to be the most difficult in terms of explaining/understanding work that I’ve made up to this point. It’s like the story of a landscape genre painter/ camper rolling around on the floor because he can’t leave the apartment (my story). They feel like little self-portraits and also deaths. They feel like they contain a lot. They feel heavy. They’re like dying memories of what an old kind of happiness once felt like. Another success is that I realized I should perhaps paint fewer landscapes (stop mouthwatering over the ground). I think the funnest images to make were Study for Emptiness 3 and Study for Emptiness 7 (the purely abstract images). They are my favorites from the series as they feel like the most honest portrayal of the feeling of emptiness (no one can really see a feeling). They are just big emptinesses over and over. They feel more engaging than the big barren empty chests’ of land and skeletal trees. It’s nice to move around and grow and make things, isn’t it?

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Study for Emptiness /// [BLOG: CRIT 2]

The more I work on this series, the more I understand how to go about depicting emptiness. The most valuable thing I’ve recently started to understand, is when to stop painting. Emptiness means to contain nothing, so therefore these paintings should at the very least contain less. I feel that I must even limit the small narratives in these images. Change the language so that they can’t speak so clearly. They need to feel like reductions — a sketched sun, an empty container, a field under the sky and nothing more. I’ve recently noticed the importance of memory in this series too. While this is my own visualization of emptiness, this is also a depiction of how I remember feeling the feeling of emptiness. Honestly, this series is still quite mysterious to me. The paintings feel reflective about the pandemic, mournful of time spent. They’re still making themselves known to me.

Follow-up and a Question Answered /// [BLOG: CRIT 2]

All of this work (Study for Emptiness 3, and 4) was made Feb 6th — Mar 2nd, 2021. See some of the sketches for these pantings below.

What struggles did you have with the work?

The issue I find myself fighting with the most, is the intellectual grappling with the concept of the series (the condensed concept being emptiness explored through the landscape). I find myself questioning everything with this series. I’m unsure if the text is necessary, or if the depicted objects (containers, lamps, cubes) translate in a meaningful way. I think it’s very possible that the more I work in this series, the more minimal the work will become. I googled the word “emptiness” tonight, and the first image was of a white empty room, from an article titled “Love or Emptiness.” The photo was credited as being done by rawpixel.com (a free stock images bank), and it felt like that image could fit snuggly as the conclusion to this series. It was truthful — a depiction of nothing inside something. I guess something must exist for emptiness to take place inside of. Unsure though. But the room became a landscape in the landscape’s absence. Perhaps these paintings are becoming similar in spirit to free stock images. Maybe that’s significant, or even a little cool. Unsure.

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Study for Emptiness /// [BLOG: CRIT 1]

This series explores isolation and emptiness through the vehicle of landscape. Experimenting with implied narrative (Study for Emptiness 2 and forthcoming), the pieces in this series beg for reaction and concerted eyes (create a curiosity), but the images remain vague enough to create a feeling of separation (“what’s lost in translation?”), a longing for what’s right before you. The representational aspects of these images are held by a border. An intentional emptiness surrounding it (the image separates itself from itself), a reminder of the artist’s presence, a nod to the performative act of painting (the cleaning of the brushes on the image itself) (these paintings recognize that they’re paintings). The images are self-aware, know the guilt of their own artifice, and cope with their being.

Abstracted text appears in small areas of these paintings — the text itself is visually indeterminate, and is to be more interpreted through the words’ connotations rather than the words themselves (how an old poem may be remembered), abstracted by memory — the feeling of the thing. The text itself evokes sensory experiences/feelings and/or is lifted straight from my sketchbooks — clueing in the viewer of the larger world these images exist inside of. Symbols are utilized as well (Study for Emptiness 1 and forthcoming), interior items implying isolation — lamps, empty containers, beds, windows, etc. When all of these aspects tangle they reveal a complicated relationship manifesting as the image itself — a final image that operates fully as a representation of the complexity (we live nuanced lives), overstimulation (the internet will kill you), and real (funny) sadness of the contemporary moment. In COVID-World, I find myself focusing on one thing: emptiness.

Follow-up and a Question Answered /// [BLOG: CRIT 1]

All of this work (Study for Emptiness 1, 2, Study for a Study for Emptiness(es) or “2020 Painting”) was made Jan 8th-Feb 2nd, 2021. See some of the sketches for these pantings below.

Where is this work leading you next?

This work is confronting things I’ve wanted my work to confront for a very long time. I feel like it’s easy to imply emotion (a sad pond), but an implied emotion isn’t immediately felt, isn’t a happening — it’s a slow burn, a thing that lives with you (this work is similar to past work in genre (landscape) but through paint application, it becomes a much more violent affair). This is a valid way to communicate, and all art can really do is imply. But the world we live in is so close to what these paintings imply — an emptiness, a time of real emptiness. This work is leading me to a place more immediate than my past work, a place of quick injections of terror and (absurd) reality. The internet is our means for communication. While Zooming with friends, you do know you're just alone in a room looking at the computer. And the computer does not love you. So, my reaction to this depressing era is melancholic, brooding landscapes. They are representational of all aspects of this time in my (and the world’s) life. They are the opposite of the computer, but just as tragic. This work is leading me to a clearer vision of a collapsing future (in a funny and perhaps ironic but still sincere way).

In The COVID World, I’ve been printing instead of painting. See some of that work below.

Some of the work I did while in Europe can be found below, some was done in my sketchbook and some done on free sheets of watercolor paper. 9/12/19

Update 3/31/19

All is well, spring is falling into place, it is strangely still cold(ish) sometimes in Florida. It’s been a while since I’ve updated the blog, so here is a lot of the everything I’ve been working on as of late. There are paintings, drawings, flowers, skulls, creeks, squirrels & an album (see below). I’ve recently been awarded a scholarship through the Radius Workshop out of Gainesville, Florida, to study abroad (Croatia, Italy, Austria) and I am very excited / appreciative about / of that.

2 New Songs 01/02/18

Watch me holler into the void of my grandpa's shed. This is a live recording of Brent Matheny and I (recorded by Joshua Thomas) playing 2 new songs, from the Variety Peaches album. 

CLICK HERE TO CHECK IT OUT

Sob Story 12/26/17

Lets get right to it. All of my work up to this point, has been about my love / confusion / sick infatuation in relationship to one single person, my muse if you will. That person is no longer a part of my life (since May of this year). I feel like my work has played a toxic role, aiding me in romanticizing the broken things in my life and helping me to fall into a pit of reliance on others and depreciation. I no longer associate with my former creations, and hope to eventually be completely separated from the mindset that made such things possible. I plan to, in 2018, completely reshape my artistic voice. I want to make work that speaks truthfully and unreservedly about me, and not about anyone else. 

This summer I was swallowed by the worst stint of depression that I've ever experienced. I destroyed my savings, throwing all of my money at alcohol, etc. I couldn't sleep in my own bed for 2 months, I could barley bring myself to step outside sober, or to smoke any less than two packs of cigarettes a day. I relied on Ritalin to keep me awake, and on Merlot and Whiskey to put me to sleep. It was bad (though on the bright side, I did acquire a homeless piano and made some good friends along the way). I didn't paint for 6 months, from June - December. Now, finally I am beginning to feel comfortable in my own skin, and (drumroll) it's time to pick back up the paint brushes. During this stretch of depression and self loathing, I did create a thing, (that’s coming to you next year) so lets talk about that -