Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
Image 1 of 1
2024
40 × 56 in.
Acrylic on Canvas
Karina is one of those paintings where there is almost too much happening to know where to look first. Characters, writing, memories, anger, sadness, cartoons, references, jokes, and pieces of myself are scattered across a massive canvas. That chaos is intentional because that is what this relationship felt like inside my head.
At the time, I felt like I had been used for sex by someone I genuinely cared about. There were lies that felt strange and manipulative, stories that did not make sense, and eventually things being said to people who were close to me that damaged some of those relationships too. For a while, I watched people I cared about believe a version of me that I did not recognize. Eventually some of those people began seeing the situation differently, but by then the damage had already affected me.
I hated love for a while after that.
The hardest part was realizing that I had always believed loving someone meant giving them everything. If I loved you, I would do anything for you. I thought that was romantic. I thought sacrificing pieces of yourself for another person proved how much you cared.
Karina came out of realizing how wrong I was about that.
Love should not require destroying yourself to keep someone else happy. You cannot pour everything you have into another person while leaving yourself completely empty. I had to learn that loving yourself is not selfish and that another person should add something to your life rather than become your entire life.
The painting itself became almost like a map of that realization. Some sections are painful and personal. Others are ridiculous. There are characters I love, pieces of pop culture, fragments of conversations, thoughts about relationships, loneliness, sex, anger, and the strange things my brain grabbed onto while I was trying to understand what had happened. There is even humor buried inside it because that is how I process things. Even when something hurts me, eventually some stupid character or joke finds its way in.
Looking at it now, I do not really see a painting about her anymore.
I see a painting about the version of myself who still believed that giving someone everything was the same thing as loving them.
It took an unhealthy relationship for me to understand something I probably should have understood much earlier.
Love someone deeply, but never so deeply that there is nothing left of you.
2024
40 × 56 in.
Acrylic on Canvas
Karina is one of those paintings where there is almost too much happening to know where to look first. Characters, writing, memories, anger, sadness, cartoons, references, jokes, and pieces of myself are scattered across a massive canvas. That chaos is intentional because that is what this relationship felt like inside my head.
At the time, I felt like I had been used for sex by someone I genuinely cared about. There were lies that felt strange and manipulative, stories that did not make sense, and eventually things being said to people who were close to me that damaged some of those relationships too. For a while, I watched people I cared about believe a version of me that I did not recognize. Eventually some of those people began seeing the situation differently, but by then the damage had already affected me.
I hated love for a while after that.
The hardest part was realizing that I had always believed loving someone meant giving them everything. If I loved you, I would do anything for you. I thought that was romantic. I thought sacrificing pieces of yourself for another person proved how much you cared.
Karina came out of realizing how wrong I was about that.
Love should not require destroying yourself to keep someone else happy. You cannot pour everything you have into another person while leaving yourself completely empty. I had to learn that loving yourself is not selfish and that another person should add something to your life rather than become your entire life.
The painting itself became almost like a map of that realization. Some sections are painful and personal. Others are ridiculous. There are characters I love, pieces of pop culture, fragments of conversations, thoughts about relationships, loneliness, sex, anger, and the strange things my brain grabbed onto while I was trying to understand what had happened. There is even humor buried inside it because that is how I process things. Even when something hurts me, eventually some stupid character or joke finds its way in.
Looking at it now, I do not really see a painting about her anymore.
I see a painting about the version of myself who still believed that giving someone everything was the same thing as loving them.
It took an unhealthy relationship for me to understand something I probably should have understood much earlier.
Love someone deeply, but never so deeply that there is nothing left of you.