Artist Statement
I don't know if I'm super social, but being with other people always saves me and reminds me of humanity's beauty. I started a recent painting of myself and my friend Angel, who's sat for many paintings and enthusiastically endured years of us creating images together, beginning in 2010. This recent night completely relieved me of a sad funk I'd been in for months. We've known each other since we were teenagers; we did New York City Nightlife, underground queer club kids-kind-of-thing in the early-mid 00s. She's a trans woman, my first trans friend, whom I didn't even think about that way; and certainly didn't realize my own transsness at the time. We were living in the moment sans labels.
We've shared numerous nights and seen many sunrises, the bittersweet kind when you know you've been up too late. The magic is starting to wane. When I go home after she was sitting for this new painting where we talk about everything, the banal and crazy life experiences—I have this renewed appreciation for humanity. I'm thinking, feeling really, the capacity everyone has to be outstanding, complicated, and surprising. And that's *always* the experience I get when painting someone I know or am getting to know, and even in a more fraught way, in self-portraiture. That act of painting and sharing makes me want to live and be a human in this world with other humans. Yeah, I know. It sounds melodramatic, corny even, but it's truthful.
