I Thought I Knew Where My Word Portraits Came From

Art imitates life and life imitates art. Art is life is art. 

I’ve been writing for several weeks about where my word portraits came from. Connecting all the seemingly random dots. 

Sorting through memories to tell the origin story that everyone wants to hear. 

“How did you come up with word portraits?”

Well, it all started with my brother writing on his art. 

No, actually, it was these scribble drawings. 

It was a typography class. 

It started with a question in school. 

To be honest, I’ve enjoyed writing about where it all came from. Seeing myself from a 30,000 foot point of view. 

I’ve connected things I didn’t realize were connected. 

But nailing down the moment where it all made sense has been difficult. The reality is I don’t think there was a single moment. I think I just made what interested me when I was younger and I tried to ask big questions of myself. 

I look back on work from my 20’s and it is filled with religious iconography because I had just lost my faith. 

My art helped me through that. 

And the writing helped. I love that I was smart enough to adopt that from my brother and make it mine. 

And I love that my dad instilled in me a desire to always keep learning because it lead me to taking clases in my 30’s and realizing that inspiration comes from the strangest places and its not important to know where ideas come from, only to recognize when to follow one. 

I’m still searching. 

Even though I could probably just milk word portraits for the rest of my life. 

It’s not enough for me. 

I want too much. I’m greedy for life. Greedy for the experience and rush of coming up with something new. I love the sense of discovery. And oddly enough, I’ve felt more creative in the last year than maybe in my whole life. 

But the difference is I have 30 years of making art to build on. 

And I guess that’s the trick of it. You have to make the work to have something to build on. 

I took some pretty serious detours with my artistic career. 

And there are times when I wish I could have just believed in myself as a kid and made my art and sold it but despite leaving a cult and leaving my faith and taking the hero’s journey through drugs and alcohol I was afraid. 

Afraid that no one would like my art. 

Afraid that I’d run out of ideas. 

Afraid that success would change me. 

Afraid that I would have to choose between being an artist and having a family. 

So I took every path I could to avoid being here. 

And now that I’m here I’m in awe of how great my life feels. For the first time I have more work than I know what to do with. Instead of being stressed about being able to pay for food and gas I’m stressed about balancing all the projects on my plate. 

Instead of worrying about not being able to provide I’m worried about being too distracted to be a good parent. 

My mind is always on overdrive. 

I had a moment of clarity working on a farm a few months ago and all of that feels like it belonged to someone else now. 

I found direction and lost it again and but now I have something else.

Faith. 

But I lost my faith 30 years ago. 

So what is this? 

I built a career out of asking questions and I’ve spent weeks trying to answer them only to realize last week that there are no real answers. 

Not for me. 

Where did this all start?

I don’t actually know. 

I thought that I did and I was having so much fun digging it all up and sorting through the memories. And last week while I was tracking down the typography project I found something really interesting. 

It was a drawing from one of my first art classes in college. 

I didn’t take art classes until my third year. 

I thought I was going to be a computer science major. And I hated that so I started taking design classes because a friend said I was good at art and I might like it. 

And I did, but the requirements meant taking art classes and once I took my first college-level art class and saw my growth I couldn’t picture my life going in any other direction. 

But that’s the thing; you don’t always get to choose. 

I’ve taken so many different paths and they’ve all wound up here. 

It always comes back to making art. 

And I wish I had the clean origin story, but it’s not. It’s messy. 

It was interesting looking at that drawing from 2001 (2002?) 

Religious symbolism. Lots of psychedelic references. And tucked away in a corner was a face composed entirely of the word fear written over and over and over. 

What. The. Fuck.