quel beast is an artist

Brooklyn, NYC

You know your mirror face? Yeah, my art’s like the opposite of that. The most real emotions are the ones you can’t control on your face. It’s the grit and the lines that show our humanity, not the photoshopped smiles we are used to seeing in ads. Perfection as it is sold to us is an unattainable, machinelike capitalist notion. Humanity is dirty, inefficient and real.

Ads on the street are all the same. An image is perfected and mass-produced. My art is imperfectly repeated. I may paint two or three portraits from the same photo and they’ll always look different based on what I notice, learn or accentuate. There isn’t one eternal ideal; there is ephemeral beauty.

When I put art on the street it gets faded, ripped, painted over and eventually dies. It’s a sacrifice to the art gods. It’s a metaphor for our impermanence.

I don’t want to download my brain to a microchip and live forever in the machine. I don’t want there to be ads on the moon. I want to feel something so real in the fleeting moment that it twists my face into an entirely new expression. And then I want to paint it.