Scan Me

2024
12 × 12 in.
Acrylic, Spray Paint, and Paint Marker on Canvas
Original / 1 of 1

I wanted to know what was inside me.

Not physically.

Me.

I painted this during a period when I was struggling with myself and trying to understand who I was. I felt disconnected from my own emotions. It felt like I had no heart, no feelings, and no real explanation for why I was continuing to move through life.

So I imagined being scanned.

If somebody could put me in front of a machine, look through everything on the outside, and actually see what was happening inside me, what would they find?

In the painting, the answer is almost nothing.

There is a skeleton. There are bones. There is a body.

But there's no heart.

That absence is the most important part of the painting.

A heart is obviously something that physically keeps us alive, but we also use it to describe almost everything that makes being alive actually mean something.

We love with our hearts.

We get our hearts broken.

We tell people to follow their hearts.

We describe someone as having a good heart.

So what happens when you feel like yours isn't there?

At the time, I felt like I was existing more than I was living.

Wake up.

Go through the motions.

Do what I'm supposed to do.

Repeat.

There was still a person standing there. There was still a body functioning. From the outside, everything could technically appear normal.

But inside, I felt empty.

And that scared me because what is the point of being alive if you can't feel yourself living?

I think that's why creating became so important to me.

Even when I couldn't completely understand what I was feeling, I could draw it.

I could paint it.

I could take something invisible inside my head and make it physically exist in front of me.

Maybe that's what this painting really became.

The machine in the painting never found my heart.

But the fact that I needed to make the painting in the first place might be proof that it was still there.