Creating Order from Chaos | The First Question That Led to My Word Portraits

My professor used to say that great art comes from asking questions.

At the time, most of my questions weren’t why or what if.

They were how.

I had come home from college struggling with my art. I’d grown up believing that if you didn’t use your talent, you’d lose it. Of course, I took that idea to an unhealthy extreme. If I went a day without drawing, I worried I was slipping backward, losing skills I’d spent a lifetime trying to develop.

The irony was that I wasn’t even that skilled and I was still so young.

Maybe I knew it, and that’s why I was so afraid of losing what little I’d patched together through depressed drawing sessions and endless experimentation.

I was also using drugs at the time, and my negative self-talk had become deafening. I hadn’t learned healthier ways to carry the things I was struggling with.

Art became my therapy long before I realized that’s what it was.

I remember one afternoon having a small meltdown because I couldn’t figure out what to draw. My professor had always said that good artists don’t wait for lightning to strike.

They just work.

Picasso said that inspiration exists, but it must find you working.

I wanted to make serious art, but every idea seemed to collapse the moment it hit the page.

I looked back at what I was drawing and realized something.

I wasn’t just dissatisfied with the drawing.

I was dissatisfied with the identity behind it.

Smoking weed wasn’t an identity.

It was just something I was doing and my art was just a record of my new escape. I’d been working on a sort of psychedelic page where I’d masked out 420 and was drawing these flowing shapes. 

But it didn’t mean anything, it was another idea that collapsed before it could hold any meaning.

So I started over.

I took some more masking tape and applied it to another page in my notebook, forming a single word.

Fear.

I didn’t have a plan anymore.

So I stopped trying to have one.

I just started scribbling.

Covering the page with pen.

Wild, loose, erratic chaos breaking apart that pristine sheet of paper.

After a few moments, something started to happen.

I caught a glimpse of something that almost resembled a face.

I tightened the loops just a little while keeping the marks loose, and I watched a face emerge from the chaos.

It was one of the most exciting moments of my life.

For the first time in my life I was having a conversation with my work. The drawing was talking back, informing me, telling me what it wanted to be. 

More shapes appeared.

More faces.

I carved into the page, adding words and symbols, building density so the negative space would reveal itself when I finally pulled away the masking tape.

Looking at it now, it reminds me a little of Willem de Kooning’s Excavation.

Not because it looks like the painting.

Because it feels like I was trying to excavate something from the mess of lines.

The drawing itself isn’t very good.

But the discovery changed everything.

For the first time, I was asking a real question.

Could I create order from chaos?

I had no idea that this simple question would eventually lead me to develop the word portrait style that has defined so much of my work over the last two decades.