On Making Art
Oct 27th, 2023
Believing that all things are possible.
1989.
Right after my mother was hit by the car that night she was unconscious and wasn’t breathing. And when they got her breathing on her own again she had no memory of me or anyone else. Her frontal lobe was damaged and she spent the following months in a Rehabilitation Center in Northern New York. I was thirteen years old and everything changed after that. Eventually it was Art Therapy that brought back her memory. Years after my mom regained her memory I was happy to find Elizabeth Retan who taught me about art therapy. I’d go to her home on West 66th Street and we spoke about Jungian psychology archetypes, symbols, and dreams. She’d send me home with an assignment and when I came back we would go over my drawing and she would teach me about them as we went along.
When I put together the book, Fiction Story, and even the photography book, Underground, I started off just doing everything myself. I went to Pearl Paint, the art store on Canal Street, and got the supplies. I printed the pages, sewed them together, created the spine, designed a mock book cover, and back cover. I would eventually hand it over to the professionals but it was important to me that I be able to physically do it myself.
In 2011, when I was putting together my Film Studio I ordered green screen and cameras and tripods and studio lights. I did editing and filming, on-location shoots and in-studio photographs and it was a lot of fun. Just showing myself that I could do these low-budget movies. I made books, magazines, and had screenings at my place with a film projector. I found places run by entrepreneurs or artists to have screenings. Just believing that all things are possible. It’s the things that you can do yourself that bring the greatest sense of healing and self-empowerment
In 2016, I was working part-time with children and teenagers with autism and special needs. I worked with these individuals one-on-one to be independent and to elevate their self-confidence. I probably spent the most time with a lovely teenager from Harlem. She found a lot of joy from watching comedic sketches on YouTube, and found comfort in watching them in a very repetitive fashion. But she did something special I noticed, which was that she took multiple videos and would line them up on my laptop and play little portions of them, essentially creating her own comedic sketch by linking them all together. I thought it was genius so I taught her film editing using Final Cut Pro. She learned it right away and then she took it to the next level all on her own. So I set up a YouTube Channel for her and now she posts all the time her original content and has over 900 videos and has over a thousand subscribers.
I think the act of building something from the ground up, growing something yourself, creating it from scratch, is one of the most powerful tools in recovering a sense of self, and balance, and emotional and mental and physical health and agility. It’s all about self-empowerment, seeing something through to fruition, or at least chipping away at it on a constant basis, to cultivate perseverance, a dedication to the cause of personal growth. But nothing truly works without love, without the highest form of love.
This is my Time Capsule episode for “Making Art” -
Oct 27th, 2023