“It has been an awakening.”

I wrote these 5 words inside the front cover of the first of several sketchbooks that I would fill cover to cover while waiting out the covid19 pandemic quarantine back in 2020. I certainly meant it when I wrote it, but at that point I had no idea what that awakening would mean for me. A spark had simply reignited. I was making art for my own reasons, and I felt alive.

For the last 16 years I’ve been attempting to restrain, contort and mold my artistic drive into something that would pay the bills.

I attended Chester College of New England, a small art school in New Hampshire, where I studied photography for a year before dropping out to take a full-time position as a studio photographer for an Antique and Fine Art auction house. I would work there for a little over 4 years. After that I worked as a tattoo artist for almost 12 years, eventually owning my own tattoo shop in Portland, ME. Both jobs I pursued not because I had a deep passion for the work, but because they seemed safe. Or so I thought.

It turns out financial safety does not necessarily go hand in hand with a safe mental state. Years of shaping my artistic output to fit clienteles wants and needs was draining. Without realizing it I began to lose any sense of identity that I had as an artist and I slipped into depression.  

Then the covid19 pandemic quarantine happened. Although many felt trapped in their homes, for me it was an incredibly freeing time.  I had time to make art I wanted to make. To explore and experiment. I ended up creating more original works in those handful of months than I had in the past several years combined. This was a turning point.

Art of my own design was, and continues to be, the way forward.