Drawing From the Well | How Old Ideas Became New Again

I used to be more nostalgic.

Clinging to my past like it was something precious.

When I lost my faith and my friends, all that changed. The preciousness of the past became a bitter reminder that I was hurt, and for many years, still hurting.

I remember the drive to college. Sitting in the back of my parents' Dodge minivan thinking to myself,

"I get to be whoever I want here."

The few friends I still had, I slowly let go of as I built new friendships.

I don't think it was intentional at the time.

I just needed to become someone else if I was going to move forward.

Maybe I just didn't want to give anyone else the chance to hurt me.

So I built a new life.

New memories.

New nostalgias.

Eventually those became heavy too.

I went to therapy in my thirties and realized my past had a stronger hold on me than I wanted to admit. I spent years learning how to let go of it.

Somewhere along the way I also let go of my need for nostalgia.

I became okay with leaving old versions of myself behind.

I think the past is difficult for artists.

The present is too.

The future is where we tend to live.

Dreaming.

Working toward a life that's always just out of reach.

But the past...

The past is the well we draw from.

Or at least it can be.

This year I gave myself permission to play.

I stopped worrying so much about whether a painting fit neatly into some larger career plan and just followed whatever idea seemed worth exploring.

Something unexpected happened.

All these old experiments started finding one another again.

For years I thought they were separate bodies of work.

Art is Life is Art.

Confessionalism.

Abstract Cities.

Word Portraits.

They felt like different artists.

Different phases.

Different versions of me trying to figure things out.

Lately I've started seeing them differently.

They weren't separate conversations.

They were all the same conversation.

I just kept approaching it from different directions.

Each series was asking a different question, but underneath those questions was the same curiosity.

What does it mean to be human?

How do we connect?

What do we leave behind?

How do we make meaning from the strange little lives we live?

I've spent years trying to find my style.

Now I wonder if I was really just trying to understand myself.

Looking back at those old paintings doesn't make me nostalgic.

It makes me curious.

I'm seeing old work with new eyes.

I'm understanding old thoughts as new thoughts.

The connections that felt invisible twenty years ago suddenly seem obvious.

I'm still not nostalgic.

But I am starting to draw from the well of my past to build something new.

Not because I want to live there.

Because I finally understand that everything I've made has been trying to tell the same story.

I just wasn't ready to hear it yet.