Why Art Matters

March 18, 2020

I started painting after a really difficult year that I spent teaching in a low-income high school in rural Alabama.

There were so many things that were difficult about that experience. I worked nearly 80-hour weeks. My school couldn’t afford a full set of books for all of the students that I had, so I spent so much time creating study guides and worksheets so they could have something to take home and study.

And also, I was teaching in a low-income school. It was the first time I had ever experienced poverty in such a real and personal way. And man, was that emotionally trying.

One of the first paintings I made after I stopped teaching is called Looking Up. It’s a beautiful painting that I absolutely love, and it’s by far one of my most popular paintings.

The thing is, it’s beautiful. But it’s also raw.

The inspiration for Looking Up is the idea of a forest after a really dark and stormy rain. You’re coming out of this really intense and stormy situation, and as the clouds begin to clear, you start to see the sun shining through the trees. The whole idea behind the painting is "sunshine after the rain.”

At the time, the painting was clearly a metaphor for my difficult year of teaching, and the beauty of coming out on the other side of that difficult experience. Of course, this message is very relevant today, too.

Ever since I made that painting, it has influenced how I see my work. My paintings are about life. And while life is certainly beautiful, life is also hard. So I try to capture both ideas in my paintings because that’s true to me.

And in fact, beauty often comes from hard things. A lot of my work is also about seasons and finding beauty in times of great change. It’s about letting go of one thing so you can make room for something new. It’s about beauty carved out of mess, and beauty carved out of hardship.

Put another way, my work speaks to the importance of peaks and valleys in life. Going through a valley makes you so much more aware and grateful for the peaks. If everything were sunshine and rainbows all of the time—if life were flat—it would be so much harder to be grateful for the really wonderful moments.

Speaking of peaks and valleys, we are in a valley right now. I think we can all agree about that.

But do you know what’s great about valleys? None of them last forever. Our peak is coming. We just have to be patient for it.

My hope is that by acknowledging all of this through my work, you’ll feel less alone.

That either through the way that I talk about my work or how others talk about my work, you’ll feel empowered and encouraged knowing that others have experienced similar hardships that you have, and you can be confident that you’ll come out on the other side just like others have before you. You just have to make it through your valley to get to your next peak.