When Paint Wasn't Enough | The Origins of My Word Portraits

Art doesn't really follow a linear path.

I often get asked how I came up with the idea of word portraits and over the years I've tried to narrow it down to this event or that, but really it was a series of experiments.

The first was the chaos drawings.

Scribbling wildly until something started to reveal itself and then adapting my movements to encourage and coax order from the chaos.

But how did that eventually become writing?

My brother is a writer who likes to paint.

He would embellish his paintings with words, the painting acting as a sort of background or accompaniment to the ideas he wanted to share.

I loved the idea.

It seemed so natural to me that these two creative pursuits could occupy the same space.

"Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." — Picasso

I wasn't going to simply write on my paintings.

I wasn't a writer.

Instead, I started mixing lyrics from my favorite songs into my chaos drawings.

Little fragments left to be discovered.

But they weren't really my thoughts. They were just songs I happened to be obsessed with at the time.

While my brother used words to make big statements, I was using them to pull people in.

As a young artist you're always trying to get people to notice you.

There's a particularly devastating feeling when you've spent a year making a body of work and someone flips through it in a few seconds before moving on.

You're desperate for someone to stay just a little longer.

The words became one way of asking them to.

Around this same time I got my first digital camera.

A one megapixel little wonder that gave me something I'd never really had before: instant feedback.

I was taking black and white photography classes in college, learning to develop film in the darkroom and celebrating whenever I found one good photograph in an entire roll.

Digital felt completely different.

I'd always loved making art on the computer, but now I could pull the real world into that world.

I started making collages.

Photographs layered over paintings.

Portraits covered with cracks from sidewalks because I was fascinated by the idea of fractured minds and fractured hearts.

I had a whole sidewalk phase.

I photographed myself sitting across a table arguing with... myself.

You can approach a fractured identity from a lot of different angles.

Looking back, maybe I was trying to understand my own.

I started college as a computer science major, drifted into design, and eventually realized art was where I belonged.

One of my classmates did a project where she projected photographs onto her own body to explore how people judge us based on what they see.

I remember seeing it and thinking...

I need a projector.

Suddenly paintings and photographs could interact.

Reality could become part of the artwork.

I called the series Art is life is Art.

I made paintings where I seemed to disappear into them.

Fight them.

Be pulled apart by them.

Every experiment opened another door.

I was having the time of my life.

My dad unknowingly made so much of that possible.

He bought me the camera.

He bought me the projector.

He believed in my ideas long before I believed they could become anything.

So for his birthday I decided to paint him.

It was the first portrait I'd ever attempted.

I painted it in watercolor because watercolor was where all of my experimentation was happening at the time.

I could work quickly.

More importantly, I could write on the paintings.

The photograph showed him holding me as a baby.

He looked almost scared; overwhelmed.

Like every new parent wondering how they're supposed to guide this tiny person through life.

The funny thing is that while I was painting it, I was about the same age he had been when the photograph was taken.

I wanted him to know something.

That he'd done alright.

Better than alright.

The painting came together but something kept bothering me.

It didn't feel like my work.

It didn't have the texture of my digital work, or the layers. It felt almost stale compared to what I’d been doing lately.

How can I give my dad a gift that isn't representative of me?

I realized that I could add words for texture but what do you even write?

Then it hit me.

This wasn't supposed to be a portrait.

It was supposed to be a letter.

A thank you.

An encouragement.

A promise.

I wrote as though no one else would ever read it.

Just him.

As honestly as I knew how.

When I gave it to him he smiled, started reading and then burst into tears.

In that moment I realized something.

The words weren't decorating the painting. They were carrying something the paint couldn't.

Years later, those experiments would grow into the word portraits I'm known for today, but looking back, I don't think I was trying to invent a new way of making portraits.

I was trying to solve a different problem.

Paint could show someone what my father looked like.

Words could tell him who he was to me.

Paint could capture a face.

Words could capture a history.

I needed both.

I just didn't know it yet.