3 Old Paintings and the Stories they Tell

I was going through my old art portfolio last night and I really noticed how the phases in my life correlated with style in my art. I thought I would share a few of the pieces and reflections here. Here they are in chronological order. 

Untitled - 2000 (acrylic) 

This is one of the oldest paintings I still have. I don't think this is a particularly good piece but also, there's a reason I never trashed it either. I guess I kinda like it. This was done in the Spring of 2000, in my last semester of college.  My roommate had moved out the year before and while I briefly had a roommate in the summer, I couldn't find another roommate. One of my closest friends had died in 1998, my girlfriend dumped me and I was a real piece of work. Lonely and yet hopeful for the next season of life to begin. 

Keep in mind that College Station, TX had one of the lowest cost of living rates in the nation. My rent for a two bedroom, 1.5 bath and it was only $500 a month. This was a pretty good apartment too! I miss the 90s. Anyway, this meant I had a whole other bedroom that was sitting empty. I began to use it as an art studio and started to tape up my best work on the walls as if it were an exhibit hall. It was a unique time in my life, I briefly wrote about somewhere on this blog....but when I look back on that time, this painting makes a lot of sense. It was a time of self-discovery, chaos, and a bit of danger. This character seems to exhibit all those qualities. 

Untitled - 2006-2009 (??) (printer ink) 

This next piece was done in the mid-2000s. At this point, I was married and had a kid or two. We had recently had our printer break, so we were left with a ton of printer ink that wouldn't fit in the new printer....so, it was either the trash or art! At this point in time, I had kept busy by working, having babies, and maintaining our first home..... and I hadn't created art in a long time.  The results were experiments in the garage because I was too impatient to find something to catch misplaced ink. I used a wet sponge and random tools on each of the pieces. Some of the paint found its way to the concrete floor and the stains were still there when we moved out over a decade later.  Some of these paintings are bright like this one but most are dark. They are a bit moody but this was purely a chance event, the main memory of this art was pure experiment. A lovely time of life that was busy but also a time of experimentation and purity. 

Untitled, 2012-2015 (?) (acrylic paint and ink) 

The last piece came from the early 2010s, maybe as late as 2014. If the last piece was just random experimentation, this next piece is its polar opposite. When I was bored, I would often draw these maze-like structures, usually on the margins of notes, ever since college. The design would grow around the notes and other doodles. It was just fun to do. I decided I should do a whole piece of my maze structures one day. This is on a single sheet, maybe a 12X10, so it's not too big but it's not small either....it was painstaking and time-consuming work. After the kids were tucked in,  I would sit in the kitchen and build the maze in pencil, trace in ink, and later I colored it in red acrylic paint with the smallest brush you could buy. Sure, I could have used a red pen....but there was something extremely satisfying about using the brush. It was an act of relaxation that yet, it doesn't quite look relaxing at all. I hold only lovely memories of those days and yet they were exhausting. A simple painting that took hours of effort. No doubt, we had a deceptively simple life but a life that took hours of love and patience to make it work.