Throughout my life experience, I have always been fixated on the aspects of life that often go unnoticed or unrecognized amidst the chaos of how the world functions. Functioning within society is easier when an individual focuses on their own objectives and ignores the aspects of its society’s inner workings that do not pertain to their immediate experience or goals. As people find their place within this madness, they are encouraged to focus on how they can best be considered successful. This is how we are taught to maintain our sanity, putting energy into what is within our control and improving our relationship with our own existence. Due to my own inability to find the secret that enables the productive members of society to find contentment and certainty in their life, I have become enamored with trying to understand what drives other people. There is meaning to be found within acknowledging that every person has their own personal universe that exists within them. Each person has their own context that has generated how they interact with the world and there is so much insight to be gained from attempting to understand their perspective and relationship with life. Thus, the people whom I have chosen to represent in my paintings are those ordinary and endlessly special individuals who have positively influenced my life.

Blue collar workers have been my favorite people to gain insight from due to the way they have learned to exist. They contribute so much to society and the knowledge they hold is often unrecognized due to the way society tends to overlook their importance. Learning the details of their lives and what drives them has allowed me to learn how to handle my own struggles in life. Being able to depict the people who might otherwise be overlooked has been the way I have found meaning in my art. I also depict old photographs of my family to remind myself that before I came into their lives, they had their own journey and experiences. At times, it is hard to understand that parents, for example, have their own universe outside of their relationship with you and that impacts the way in which they handle their lives. By trying to understand what experiences and context has impacted an individual’s life makes it easier to understand what influences their actions to better be able to understand and empathize with them. I have learned to take a second and think about the unseen motivations of others. This practice of representing people to remind myself that everyone has context allows me to give recognition to those who have shaped my existence.

I also felt it would be interesting to compare that work to my own context. Seeing the way in which I go about depicting others, given that they are what drives the work I want to be viewed, shows a compartmentalized view of who I am. Most of my fixation on others has been selfishly motivated by my own struggles. Though I can create depictions of people I find important and influential in a way that does them as much justice as I can, I struggle with depicting myself positively. I feel that insight about myself can be discovered when contrasting their portraits with the work that pertains to my own struggles with mental illness. Doing so allows me to display my context and also have the importance I place on others come full circle conceptually in order to show what I consider to be The Unseen.