The ongoing body of work, and the first day of my installation Hello World in the McNay exhibition Transamerica
There are days when I just can’t take another minute of myself, and today was a day where during one of my live-treams if you were watching, would have been exposed to a vignette of anger.
Some days I can feel absolutely incompetent or incapable of achieving anything. To understand where one stands can be a crippling state of self-awareness. With the exhibition coming up I was beginning to feel the effects of Impostor Syndrome.
This day was one of those days where frustration, self-loathing, and disgust all came together into one burst of anger.
I hated everything I was doing and destroyed my painting as a result.
An immature response? Definitely.
Cathartic? Absolutely.
It’s maddening, really. Confronting one’s reality over and over again. It’s a bit of an analog for hell when you think about it.
Doing the same thing repeatedly, each and every day, somehow expecting a different result to occur. As if these portraits or the figure in the mirror might actually somehow change. But it’s never the case.
I went home, had a nice stiff drink, and spent the rest of the day attempting to distract myself with anything other than art.
On days like these, it can be good to turn your brain off and just devour mindless brain candy.
The next day when I got to the studio, I hung the painting on the wall.
Pass or fail, no matter what happens, it all goes on the wall for all to see.
This is my self-portrait oil painting number 19 in my series, Diary of a Trans Woman.
From my installation Hello World at the McNay Museum of Modern Art as part of the exhibition Transamerica: Gender, Identity, Appearance Today in 2019.