Barbie

2023
30 × 48 in.
Acrylic on Canvas

Barbie is probably one of the most emotionally overloaded paintings I have made. There is no single scene because at the time there was no single feeling. The entire canvas became a place for everything happening in my head after a relationship ended in a way I never saw coming.

I thought I understood the relationship and where we stood. Then on January 1st I found out she had been on Tinder, where she was going by Lola, and that she had been unfaithful. Starting a new year by discovering that the person you trusted was living another version of her life was a pretty brutal wake up call.

I felt like an imbecile. That word literally ended up in the painting because that was how I saw myself. I replayed conversations, memories, warning signs, things I should have noticed, and things I wished I could change. I was angry at her, but I was also angry at myself for feeling like I had somehow allowed myself to be fooled.

So I painted everything.

There are characters crying, people breaking apart, bodies trapped, words, memories, jokes, anger, sadness, and random thoughts scattered across the canvas. Some parts are carefully drawn while others feel almost thrown onto it. That is exactly what my head felt like. I was not trying to make one beautiful image. I was trying to get everything out of me because at the time it felt like I was being destroyed from the inside out.

Part of how I protected myself was convincing myself that she would never find anyone like me. I viewed myself incredibly highly and basically thought anyone else she met was garbage compared to what she had lost. Looking back, some of that was confidence and some of it was hurt. It was easier to believe she had made the biggest mistake of her life than admit how badly what happened had affected me.

But buried inside all of that destruction is something else.

During that transition I met another woman. She had black hair and a tattoo with the number 28. My ex was blonde, and suddenly here was someone completely different entering my life while I was convinced one person had ruined everything. It reminded me of something incredibly simple that is almost impossible to believe when your heart is broken.

There are more fish in the sea.

The breakup did leave damage. Some of that distrust followed me into future relationships. Being blindsided can change the way you look at people. You start searching for signs that something is wrong because you remember what it felt like when you did not see it the first time.

But time changed that too.

Eventually the relationship became a chapter instead of the entire story. The anger faded. The embarrassment faded. The heartbreak became something I could look back on instead of something I was still living inside.

This painting captured me before I knew any of that. It is basically a giant snapshot of a brain trying to understand heartbreak in real time.

I thought I was being destroyed.

I was actually healing.