the gallery

From the beginning, the need to create - to preserve, to understand, to cherish - has been a powerful and inevitable force influencing me and the things I make. This exhibit - “MIND THE GAP” - includes my latest original ink illustrations on paper along with corresponding audio tracks by my band called The Silly Gooses. 

 

This is the way I draw because it’s the only way I know how. I failed art class in the ninth grade, and I think that shows. I’ll try to explain what I mean when I say “mind the gap,” which is that phrase used by trains in London as a warning to passengers stepping on or off the platform. 

 

Not long ago, a hometown friend let slip that an artist from our graduating class said my Instagram reeked of “cringe, performative coffee shop doodler vibes.” Her name is Allison Bills, and she’s a very talented photographer for NASA. 

 

More than anything, I worry with angst that I appear deaf to my talentlessness, or that I take myself too seriously. Like an all-too-brave American Idol contestant. Delusions of grandeur.

 

And to some extent I may have overcorrected, taking myself so unseriously that it borders on a Dostoevskian level of self-loathing, which I’m told can make people feel uncomfortable.

 

Probably it takes a whole life to “mind the gap.” To make peace with the gap between the things you want to do, and the ways in which you cannot. The life we dreamed, yet do not have. 

 

To mind the gap… and to do it all, still, in spite of it. In spite of myself. I think that is important.