METAMORPHOSIS

Freedom is ego death, again and again and again. It’s choosing to love anyways, in spite of having to let go over and over and over. It’s transcending fear of change to release what’s no longer meant to be held. The work I make, as a Brown woman, will be seen by the world as reflective of Brown women.

Some of my musings on coming into myself this year follow:

• Radical self honesty must come first before achieving self acceptance, which is self love.

• You have to discern who you are based on what you believe in, rather than what you do not want to be or are not yet.

• Setting your intentions and living your life accordingly will produce precise, authentic work. Authenticity is what sells.  

• Passion projects will be your best work because the vision will always be so specific. These are the projects that will feel the scariest to share, and it’s about finding the right people who will hold you through all the moments before, in between, and after.

• Validate yourself and your experiences, even when they don’t make sense to others. 

• You have to want to heal to be better. You have to be willing to receive love just as much as you give love. We are not made to endure alone.

• Your happiness is your responsibility.

• Know your “why”- you’ll need to hold onto it for the days when it feels hard to be consistent. Being an artist takes grit. You will give pieces of yourself to the art that you make. 

• You are responsible for considering impact, because intent is not enough.

• Not everything you make will be good, and not everything you make will or should be shared. Being caught up in the end result and if something is “worthy” or being shared, especially in an era of social media dictating creative success, will rob you of the experience of enjoying the process. The process is where you’ll do all of the learning. 

On my style as an artist:

I like creating through a lens of realism over escapism because it requires deep connection to the present. Reality is subject to scrutiny of being correct or incorrect. To understand reality requires experiencing, understanding, and empathizing in order to expose objective truth. It requires constant discernment. It forces you to have to slow down and absorb all information presented in that objective reality, and it is often in these moments that you experience precious humanity. Creating through realism has taught me how to move with conviction, even in moments of absolute solitude. 

Creating vulnerable art is the act of transmuting your experiences from one form to the next. So the questions that must be asked are: How honest am I able to get with myself and, therefore, how much do I accept myself? How transparent am I in my work and, therefore, how connected do I feel to it?