Favorite Paintings Of The Past Year
as the paint dries on my current project, i look back at the other times i dipped a brush in paint and ruined a perfectly good canvas, or gave a second life to a piece of scrap wood.
my entire life, i was too afraid to paint. i sucked from elementary all the way through high school, so i had accepted that i just wasn’t as good with brushes as i had become with pencils. when i finished school and had all this free time, i thought ‘what the hell’ and started messing around with a box of PRANG watercolors that i had for years. i never took it seriously because i knew it wasn’t for me, but then when i started realizing i could create on a larger scale, and that i could fill-in someone’s hair without wasting entire Sharpies, i started liking it. three years after teaching myself to paint, i’m still too afraid to play with colors, but i feel confident enough to paint portraits. these are only a handful of the paintings i’ve done this year, i’ve selected these as my favorites either because they hold a deep, personal meaning to me, or because i learned something in the process of finishing them. i thank all those who have bought paintings from me in the past year, for if it weren’t for your support and encouragement, i would have stuck to paper exclusively.
again, i know it seems arrogant to pat myself on the back and talk about how i’ve come a long way and whatnot, but i recognize that i’m still an amateur dipping my toes in the pool, and i have a lot of work to do before i can swim in the deep end. i share this with you as a reminder that nobody is BORN knowing how to do anything. you never hear of infants painting masterpieces, or being great novelists. drawing, painting, spelling, bodybuilding, cooking, it all begins with nothing, it all takes practice, persistence, patience, and even if you suck at something, if you hang in there and dedicate yourself to it, you can do it.
