this was one of the first paintings I'd made that I still like! I had been tired of the monotonous feeling my life had taken ever since I moved to socal. At the time, it was January, so my mind went to previous Januaries...

I thought of the way the cold air back home used to hit my face on the bike ride to school. The way if I woke up early enough on the weekends, I got to see the windows still glazed with condensation, making everything outside look blurry and new. I thought of falling in love for the first time. I thought of how so many of my favorite memories happened during that magically sleepy time of the year. (Nothing important happens in January, therefore everything important happens in January.)

being awake too late was a source of anxiety growing up--for whatever reason, I had this panic that if I wasn't asleep by midnight, bad things would happen. I think it arose out of the fact that for most people, late nights are understood to be some kind of "failure". Procrastination, insomnia, degeneracy, something like that.

Something changed for seventeen-year-old me in the last months of high school when my parents could no longer be bothered to police my nights. At that point, nighttime became about eating homemade chocolate cake out of the fridge and finally being able to read my books in peace and just sitting and looking out the window and be mesmerized by the great night sky. Nighttime meant being alone and finding peace in that instead of anxiety.

that comic I mentioned finding in the library? Yep, I made a painting out of it. The name of this painting is a reference to the manga.

I made this painting during a bad time where I was extremely overworked, not eating, and alone. Those conditions made it easy to entertain delusions of finding the company of the cold walls of the studio to be a companion as steadfast as Charlotte of Charlotte's Web.

(Obviously I knew it was not real, but sometimes it's nice to pretend...)

this painting took a month to dry because it was made using such a high ratio of solvent to paint. A bug drowned in the solvent during the process.

someone I knew died suddenly of cancer less than three months after he graduated. It made me reflect on the fact that you can do work as hard as you want trying to secure your lot in life, but when it comes down to it, none of us hold a candle to death.

one weekend, I spent the morning watching a baby rat in the parking lot of my apartment. A fly kept trying to land on it (and I kept swatting it away). The fly probably knew, unlike me, that death was imminent. Turns out I was watching that rat's last 15 minutes of life.

The Rainbow Bridge, according to poem, is where beloved pets go after they die. Who gives a sendoff to a sewer rat?

I'd just moved into my own place and didn't have nearly enough space to make art the way I had in college, so I started making these little cards. I think there were over 100 by the end, although only a few are pictured here. The idea was that each of them was a tiny window into life as I was experiencing it, but when you combined them together, they became something greater.

I didn't draw a fire-breathing dragon, but I see one. It's one of those instances, y'know?