First Art Show and Indirect Communicating

Right now some of my art is being exhibited at my work, the Hot Chocolate Sparrow in Orleans. This is the first time a body of my work has been exhibited outside of art school. I was nervous, I was intimidated, and initially I was flat out afraid.

This isn’t art school anymore. This is the real world. While it’s a cafe rather than a gallery setting, it’s still setting my work out to the public. Not just the public, but an audience I previously hadn’t exposed my work to. Cape Cod folks….which is a hard culture to describe in itself.

The amazing part is, the show has been well received. There’s something redeeming about working at my cafe-customer-service job and having the customers compliment me as an artists. It’s comforting having pretty much all my coworkers come up to me and exclaim how much they love my work. It’s reassuring to have conversations about the work, and having people get it. People that aren’t just my best friends who understand my brain, but rather people I never knew I had much in common with.

That is the greatest and most exciting thing of all. Realizing that yes, my work can connect with people. It’s such a surreal feeling.

To top it off, I found out an artist I admire likes my work. Last fall, while interning at the Provincetown Art Association and Museum, there was one artist’s work that I really connected with. Selina Trieff. Her paintings captivated me. It turns out, she came into the show and said that I “have some talent’. This is one of the things I love about art, the connection. We both independently saw each other’s work and we both connected with it, oblivious that the other person had connected with our own work. I’ve had a similar thing happen while doing Marilyn Monroe research. I was reading the book “Life Among the Cannibals” by David Marshall, and while reading the book he contacted me saying he found my work very powerful. I’ve also now been in contact with another author who’s work I love, Tara Hanks. Turns out, she likes me Marilyn work as well.

The idea of the anti-social tortured artist is bullshit. Art is communication, and I think sometimes I bury myself in theory and overthinking and my own mind. It’s really extraordinairily simple. In the age of facebook, twitter, blogs, texts, and almost every possible form of nearly instant communication……sometimes we forget that a painting, performance, or a books aren’t at all an outdated form of communication. In fact, they still manage to trump all that shit.