This obsession with art and creation is rooted beyond the start of my memory. My Mom and Dad tell stories of how I was moved up from Kindergarden to First Grade when I was a boy because I was filling up the classroom walls with my work. I’m sure they romanticize the details, but it is true that I moved up a grade at a young age due to advanced competency in communications. I was able to channel well.
I remember creating a book about dinosaurs when my age could be counted on one hand. Construction-paper covered stories about superheroes when my age could not yet be counted on two. The pictures and stories, the scenes and the landscapes kaleidoscope inside of me. I do my best to capture what I can,
but I mostly miss the best stuff. It is my duty to capture the fast-passing light, and translate it into life, for the future, for the present, for the past.
I’m not prideful. I don’t gloat over the fact that only once in my life was I not held back, that my true brilliance was recognized and applauded. The succeeded years were mostly spent being tortured by my gift, carrying a creative and monstrous burden that often set me apart from those without
drive and vision,
fire and fearlessness,
purpose and passion,
voice and diligence.
I’ve always been devoted to my craft, often sacrificing everything I am and everything I have for creation, expiring all for the thrill of giving birth or being born again, which I have done with regularity many times in my lifetime. It is how we learn to be like water, to understand the dynamism of the universe. The present is a zero-sum game, where the walls are all that matter. My past is littered with brittled husks of lives, shed with every new version of me. Their decay blows as dust in the present of this life, captured as ghosts in a reality that I can’t seem to escape from.
I’ve learned not to run. The ghosts stalk for a good reason: I need them, as much as they need me. They require audience, whether they are the reflections of a path not taken, a pain-response mechanism in the form of a poltergeist, or just a reminder that my end is coming, sooner than I want or expect. Some find fear in the face of the dead;
I find my galleryhead.