Ruin & Regrowth

It’s the second week of spring, the ice is melting and the smell of rain on wet earth permeates the frigid air. Already, there are fresh crocuses springing forth in arrays of violet and white. Soon, there will be daffodils and bluebells reaching up towards the sky as earth begins anew in this hemisphere. And I love the romance of the rain as it patters on the ground and on rooftops and windows, but my cold bones are desperate for the sun to return and bring me back from the sleep of winter.

I am in the last few months of my ‘Christ year’, the year of my lunar-solar return and according to myth, I am to be reborn, reinvented, enlightened. It would be economical with the truth to say that I feel much different within myself but I have, in many ways, come to realise what it is I truly want out of life and where I want to go with my artistic practice. I realised that much of this practice has been all consumed by tattooing these last few years as I wholeheartedly threw myself into the “day job” out of both love and necessity and gave it all of my best ideas. Now I find myself looking at a somewhat paltry archive of fine art, wondering what it really speaks of me.

For the record, I don’t regret the energy that I put into my tattoo practice as it is, to me, as much an artistic medium as any other. And I love that my incredible (and tough!) clients resonate with my work and/or choose me to bring their thoughts and feelings into the corporeal realm. It’s just that fine art doesn’t generally get up and walk out of the door when it’s finished, leaving me to wonder what became of it. Tattooing is new love in the morning, a bittersweet goodbye in the evening and a tabula rasa in-between. As such, I find myself aching to cultivate more space for myself and more personal projects in this next lunar-solar cycle. To think less about the gnashing jaws of capitalism and return to myself, to observe more fully the beauty of this world, and to paint much, much more.

And so, this spring feels somewhat symbolic to me; representing both a ruin and regrowth as I sing over the bones and breathe new life into parts of me I’ve allowed to rust. This blog, I hope, will serve to offer some insight into my thoughts, my process and to update you, dear reader, on what’s going on with me outside of the soul-crushing mire of social media. The idea, is to update semi-regularly with in-progress images of what I'm working on outside of, well, work. But in time, and with the conclusion of the covid pandemic, I also hope to show you more of the places that give me the greatest inspiration and how these ideas grow, or perish.