In the same month that I began my journey towards accepting that I am an artist, I fell in love with someone. It was May of 2018 and only three weeks before I was heading off to Berlin to start an MFA low residency program when I met Chris. I was elated to have found someone after many years of not interacting much in the dating world. So instead of hanging out in Berlin after art workshops, I would rush to the apartment I was renting to talk to Chris on my laptop. When I got home from Berlin I went straight to his place in Brooklyn.
I painted him three times and I wrote about being in love and being an artist; I was so consumed by him that my first post on my mandatory blog (necessary for the MFA program) was about Chris with an accompanying portrait I had done of him and a written portion on how art reflects life and how he was my life and so now he was my art. I imagined then, I think, that I would paint no one but him.
Three years and a pandemic later things have changed. The shine is off the relationship. We have fought over and over, much of the fighting being about my work: my painting.
I realize now that I was not being handed love and art at the same time but actually two competing forces at the same time.
I moved in with Chris and he complained chronically about the smell of the turpentine and cried about my having a drag entertainer sitting for me. He got drunk and confrontational when he found out I painted a porn star and met me with passive aggressive silence when I would come home from a residency field trip. He admitted to not liking the idea that I have studio space separate from the apartment we now share and told me that my sitting sessions (accompanied by wine and snacks and conversation) were akin to first dates.
In 2017, a Turkish photojournalist named Burhan Ozbiliki covering a gallery opening witnessed (at the opening) the assassination of Russian Ambassador Andrei Karlov. The picture he took has since won a prestigious art award and was written about in Vulture by renown art critic,Jerry Saltz.
Ozbilici took this photograph not from a crouching or hiding position. But standing straight and facing and focusing on the action. One may wonder that he didn’t understand that he was risking his life for an image. People don’t know how much the Artist will risk for an image that, whether real or imagined, is once-in-a-lifetime and a thing that only the artist—at risk of life, limb, family, marriage—can author: how much it IS worth it ALL. What struck me in looking at this photo and understanding the real potentially fatal danger Ozbilici put himself in to get this shot 5 years later and 4 years into a relationship that is hobbling on its last legs is that I know what Oz knows: the art is what matters: not death or family or leaving children without a father: and certainly art matters more than a 4 year relationship.
Chris has been fighting a losing battle. The art will always win. I will follow it until I, myself, am on my last legs.
