I am an artist.
It’s a strange thing to say. I’ve never identified myself as an artist until recently. It’s still not in the top 10 or maybe even 20 ways I’d think to introduce myself, but it’s still true.
When I was in elementary school I decided that I was bad at drawing. Anything less than photorealistic sketching wasn’t really art, so why try? Teasing from other kids about my inability to draw stick figures didn’t help either. I stopped drawing and never looked back.
Despite my choice to go down another path in 1995 there are three people who acted as Virgils during my journey to where I am today.
The first is my mom.
My mom loves art. She home-schooled all four of her children from kindergarten through the 12th grade and never passed up on an opportunity to take us to one of the art museums in the Dallas-Fort Worth area where we grew up. Even though I didn’t appreciate it at the time I grew up walking through galleries looking at works by Monet, Picasso, Matisse, Mondrian, Cezanne, and others. Later on in high school the Ft. Worth Museum of Modern Art opened and introduced me to more abstract works that included sculpture, electronic installations, film, and prints. By the time I left for college I enjoyed going to museums and perusing collections - I just had no idea about the context or meaning behind what I was looking at and viewed art in purely aesthetic terms. I was one of those people who would look at an abstract work and say “It doesn’t look like anything to me”. At least it was a start.
Visiting the Museum of Fine Art in Boston, MA with my mom in 2016. She still loves art.
The second Virgil was Dr. Katie Robinson.
Dr. Robinson taught Art 1300 at Baylor University during my final spring semester. Looking back I’m not totally sure why I signed up for Art 1300. I didn’t need the GPA boost, I didn’t need any more courses to graduate, and I didn’t need any more hours to be a full time student that semester. I think I must have done it because it felt like the kind of class that you should take in college to have a complete education experience.
Whatever my reasoning or expectations were going into the class my Art 1300 professor Dr. Robinson completely blew them out of the water over the following semester. I could go on and on about Dr. Robinson. The one thing that she impressed on me above everything else is the concept that context is a crucial part of any work of art. You can’t fully understand or appreciate a work of art without understanding the set of conditions that lead to its creation. This context includes everything from materials and methods to global politics and local artistic movements.
Suddenly art was a lot more interesting. I started seeking out art museums more actively. Over the next few years I’d visit museums across the US and around the world. I’d constantly wonder about and look up more information on the context that created the works in front of me. Life was richer for the time that I spent in art museums.
The only photo I managed to snap in the Monet museum in Amsterdam before a security guard yelled at me.
Every once in awhile I’d contemplate making art myself. I was always busy with something else though. If that wasn’t enough, the voice of elementary school aged Eduardo would whisper in my ear and remind me that I wasn’t good enough with a pencil/pen/etc to attempt to make art and that would be the end of that.
The third and shortest lasting Vrigil was Sol LeWitt.
2018 was a rough year for me. Without going into too much detail (a blog post for another decade perhaps) I found myself in the position to take several months off from my professional career. I decided to spend part of this time driving a convertible up the west coast of the USA from San Diego, California to Whistler, British Columbia. In the lead up to that trip I stumbled across an article online that referenced a famous letter Sol LeWitt wrote to Eva Hesse in 1965. I won’t attempt to summarize his writing here. The crux of the piece is LeWitt’s exhortation to put aside your doubts and DO.
Unsurprisingly perhaps the letter is itself a work of art. You can read it in full here and even listen to a dramatic reading by Benedict Cumberbatch.
With weeks of uncommitted time ahead of me and nothing to distract me I decided to heed LeWitt’s words and make some art for the first time in 20 years. I still couldn’t draw so I chose the python programming language as my medium. I’m only a slightly better programmer than I am a draftsman. Given the circumstances I’ll take what I can get. I challenged myself to create a new piece of art every other day for several months and more or less succeeded.
One of my works from the first six months of making art.
Over the course of my journey I stopped in at every major art museum and public gallery on the west coast and spent hours wandering their wings. I fell in love with works by Mondrian, Rothko, Kline, Pollock, Noll, and (of course) LeWitt. Every time I saw something I particularly enjoyed I’d attempt to recreate it in python using the library of functions I had developed over the preceding weeks.
Recreation of the 7th wall in Sol Lewitt’s Wall Drawing 273 on display at SFMOMA in the fall of 2018.
Along the way I decided to get over my fear of artistic criticism and started sharing some of my pieces anonymously with strangers on the internet. Despite my fears I never encountered any haters in the few months I was actively engaged with the online art community. I mostly didn’t encounter anyone - a big step up from elementary school. I’ve covered most of those tracks pretty carefully. However, you can still see some of the work from this period on the infrequently updated Instagram page I made during my trip.
When I finally got home and went back to work I resolved to keep making art. From time to time I’ve added a few other tools to my tool box beyond my collection of python scripts. These days I mostly create new pieces when I’m traveling. Airplanes are great places to write code and make art when you aren’t sheltering in place in the middle of a global pandemic. My apartment is a decent second choice for all those times when you are sheltering in place in the middle of global pandemic.
Most recently I’ve created a page on this website to share some of my art as well. You can check it out here. I hope you enjoy some of my work.
I’ll be the first person to admit that my art is not good. My techniques are flawed, my methods are simplistic, I straight up do not understand how to use color, and I am inconsistent in my practice.
But you don’t have to be a good artist to be an artist. You don’t have to impress anyone else.
You only have to create art to be an artist.
You just have to do.