My Artist Quest in 2023: Expectations vs Reality

As 2023 began, I was flying high. 

My band, Mystic Tiger, had just performed an incredible single release concert for our biggest audience yet. I had set up all my original paintings on the wall behind us, and got several purchase inquiries after the show. 

What an epic start to the year, I crowed. I envisioned that by the end of 2023, I’d be a thriving, financially successful artist. My band would be performing for thousands of people all over the West Coast, I’d be doing creative expression work with six genius kids a week, and I’d be selling my art online, in local stores, at markets, and to wealthy patrons all over the state. 

That didn’t happen.

Nope, what actually happened is that my band – which I had put so many hopes and dreams into over the past five years – disbanded. 

Despite all my attempts to attract creative expression clients, from flyers and Facebook posts to vendor fairs and sample classes, I only continually worked with one kid, the same one I’ve worked with since 2020.

As for selling art, I set up a booth at an art market and in eight hours, made a grand total of $0. 

If I wanted to write a story about how I had dreams and aspirations for this year and failed to achieve them, and how I failed to make more money than I spent, those are the details I would use. 

But that’s not how I choose to tell the story of this year. 

The story is so much deeper and more beautiful than that. In fact, it’s much deeper and more beautiful than the grandiose one I had initially crafted for myself at the start of the year. 

This is a story about what happened when I stuck with the artist’s journey – when no matter what hardships arose, I kept creating. I kept singing, and I kept painting. And I kept listening to what wanted to be created through me. 

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“Go to the woods and sing.” 

“Wha?” 

“Go to the woods, and sing some melodies, and try to visualize the sound. That might help you understand how to capture it in your painting.” 

These were the instructions given to me by Joe Bob, one of the teachers in my weeklong visionary art workshop, Mixtek Mystics, at the Chapel of Sacred Mirrors in upstate New York. It was October, and I stood in front of twenty of my fellow artists in the freshly-remodeled classroom for intensive visionary art study. Every day for the past week, each of us had spent hours and hours sitting at our easels, looking into the mirror, and drawing what we saw. Our facial features, the light reflecting on our hair, the subtle blues and greens mixed in with the yellows and pinks of our skin. 

I had decided to draw myself singing, with my mouth open and my hands outstretched. For almost the entire day before, I had been stuck on the hands. Drawing, erasing, painting in, then painting over. Just when I thought I had captured their exact pose, Amanda, our teacher, would come over and point out something I missed. The positioning of the second left knuckle. The bend of the right pinky finger. Over and over and over I tried, until I wanted to throw something. 

I cried at lunchtime that day. I felt so frustrated by my inability to make my hands look real and alive. I felt so humbled, knowing how many more hours and years and decades of painting experience the visionary artists of CoSM had on me, and how much more complex and vibrant and dedicated their pieces were. I felt worry that I didn’t belong at this workshop, that the students around me had moved on to later stages of their paintings and I was falling behind because I had made things unnecessarily hard for myself and because I was so goddamn precious with every tiny stroke I made. 

“Why am I spending so much time on this??” I griped to Joe Bob.

He paused. “Do you want to render the hands well?”

“Yes,” I said instantly, without thinking.

“Then that’s enough. Who cares about the why?”

True that.

Eventually, with Amanda’s patient guidance, I got my hands in a place I was satisfied with. My physical form was more or less rendered well. 

Now, after all the careful looking at observational 3D reality, it was time for the inner eye to do its work. Hence, why I went to the woods to sing to the trees. I needed to figure out how to paint my singing. 

On the grounds of CoSM, the fall leaves swayed in the New York autumn breeze, and I breathed in crisp air, trying to bring it into my chest and ease the tension that had built up there.

Tension was a thing I had been constantly feeling in my chest and body since I got laid off at the beginning of 2022 and decided to become an artistic entrepreneur. 

“Tension makes it hard to sing,” Crystal, my new voice teacher, said to me in one of our first lessons at the start of 2023. “The stress we experience manifests as tension in our bodies, and that shuts down our voice, because it’s all connected.” 

She taught me a series of body exercises designed to access and release years of pent-up tension in our bodies, to free our voices. In her intimate zoom class of four students, I laid on the floor of my bedroom with my legs in an extended butterfly shape, and felt my thighs vigorously trembling of their own accord. The shaking spread to my torso and flung my arms all around. It felt so forceful that I would have been scared if she hadn’t assured us that this was what’s supposed to happen. 

I worked once a month with Crystal for the whole year, and she taught me everything from releasing my tension and straightening my posture to letting my body’s wisdom steer the ship of vocal technique, rather than my mind directing. 

“Your body knows,” she would say as she had me cough and feel which part of my diaphragm was engaged, and how. She had me sing the most difficult phrases of my favorite musical theater songs with an exaggerated expression like excitement or wonder, and let it naturally guide me to the right vocal placement. 

After I sang “The Light in the Piazza” in our March lesson, more easily and freely than I thought was possible, I cried and she held me. “I feel so grateful,” I sobbed, remembering the years and years of frustration and despair I had felt, trying and failing to reach the level of control and precision and power that all my favorite Broadway singers had. Going all the way back to auditions for my second grade talent show, when I stood in front of my class intending to sing “Journey to the Past” from Anastasia but struck with so much fear that nothing came out. 

“I feel so happy that you feel that way,” she said, still hugging me. “It’s a new beginning.” 

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As the trees swayed in the woods around me, I started singing a made-up melody with made-up words. “What is the shape of my voice?” The sound meandered freely out, full and clear. “I don’t know, but it flows,” was the responding melody. On and on like that, until I had some quality adjectives to works with: flowy, nuanced, focused, multicolored. I came back to the classroom and started playing with a few sketch concepts, until I had one I felt was right. 

It was the last night of our art seminar. We had all been pulling late nighters as the week went on, and developed a special kind of camaraderie as we got delirious and silly from painting until 2 in the morning. Each of us with our unique faces to paint, and visions to render, and set of challenges to overcome. The night before, I had sat at my easel and stared at my self-portrait while doing intensive breathwork, until I saw a lotus appear in the empty space above my portrait’s head.

“Noooo,” I complained to Niko, who sat at the easel next to me. “I don’t wanna paint a lotus. So much worrrrk.” 

He laughed and I heard Amanda’s voice admonishing me in my head: don’t be lazy! So, it was 2am, and I started painting the goddamn lotus. I also painted lightning coming out of my ears because it was 2am and fuck it. 

So, on this last night, we were all in. A bunch of us went outside to commune with the spirit of cannabis, which made me feel goofy and want to dance. Amanda put on a Goldcap Burning Man sunrise set and a few of us started a dance party in the studio, waving our arms and moving and pulsing to the beat. I started imagining how visionary art could save the world. It felt thrilling to think about, and then a bit stressful and then overwhelming as I thought about all the ways I could mess it up. 

Before I could completely spiral into a black hole of self-doubt and anxiety, though, I remembered the simple task at hand – to finish my self-portrait. Fortunately, I only had to color in all the white parts I had built up in my underpainting. Unfortunately, I didn’t have a plan for how to do so. But fortunately, Stacey, a fellow student, had come by my desk that day and commented on the beauty of the colors of my journal cover, which I knew could serve as powerful inspiration for the piece.

I made myself sit back down at my easel. Because I was stoned, I was viscerally feeling all the tension in my body built up from the week of intense focus, and how fast my heart was beating, and how quickly my thoughts were racing. Thoughts like you can’t do this started spinning in my head, threatening to spiral me into the dark place. I tried meditating to remedy it, but it was ineffective. I needed something more aggressive. So I started chugging water and doing push ups on the floor of the studio. At this point, it was late in the night, and the room had largely cleared out. I could be as weird as I wanted to be without disturbing my neighbors. 

 I observed the painting again. I was about to color it in with oil paints, borrowed from Niko, which I had never in my life used before. With one larger brush, I tentatively plopped a bit of yellow onto one of the energy ripples, and with a smaller brush, started blending it in as Niko had instructed me. 

Oh. My. God. 

SO VIBRANT!

SO MALLEABLE! 

SO CREAMY!

“I fucking love oil painting,” I said to the mostly empty room. This was the paint of my dreams. The answer to my prayers. I started going in, spreading the yellow around the center of the ripples and on what I envisioned as the brightest parts of the song lines. Then I went in with green. Purple. Green mixed with purple. Fuck it. I started mixing colors I never even knew existed before. Started blending them all together. Dancing the whole time I was doing it. 

Time stood still and I kept painting. The last person left the studio around 5am and I kept painting. What if I added orange under the yellow, like a shadow?? Ideas and epiphanies burst into my consciousness, and without hesitation, I enacted them. This is the most epic stoner coloring book ever. 

I took breaks to chug more water and do more pushups. So much energy moving through me. 

As the sun rose, people started waking up and filtering back into the room. Picking up on and remarking on my ecstatic energy, and my painting, and flowing with it – they started dancing, started putting enthusiastic finishing touches on their works. I smiled and kept painting. Niko captured the moment on his phone. 

Amanda came in, and looked at my painting, beaming. “Yeah,” she said. 

“I think I just had my visionary artist initiation,” I replied. 

“Wanna put some casein on it?” She showed me how to use the milk-based medium over the oils, and I swept it in confident, steady strokes over the lotus and the lightning as the others started setting up chairs for our closing circle. 

I finished just as we began the circle. We each had a few minutes to present our painting to the room and share anything we wanted about it. I teared up as the others showed theirs. So much beauty, so much uniqueness in each. They were tearing up, too. When it was my turn, I literally sank to my knees and sobbed onto the floor for like a minute straight. Restraining my emotions wasn’t the vibe I was on. The floodgates opened for others, too. Even the CoSM social media guy doing video recording in the back of the room cried. 

“I feel so grateful,” I finally said. “I never thought I would be here, painting what I just painted.” 

It was true. Five years ago, when I first came to CoSM, I could only gape at the works of visionary artists like Amanda and Alex Grey and the students who studied with them. I had just started to draw and paint a tiny bit, and they were scribbles in comparison. I didn’t even dream that I’d be able to study with my painting idol at the Mecca of visionary art, let alone advance my skills as much as I have working with her over the past two years. And I never dreamed I’d be able to become a part of the visionary art community, a fraction of whom had made my week at CoSM more joyful, inspiring, and full of more growth than I had thought was possible. 

Even though I made probably less than $18k this whole year, $32k less than I had envisioned, 

and even though my band broke up, 

and even though I missed most of the shots I took trying to get new clients and customers, 

the truth is that I don’t care. It’s so much more than okay. 

Because in pursuing this scary new path of being an artist, I fell more and more in love with the journey of painting and singing and creatively co-creating. I discovered deeper and deeper levels of total creative flow state that exist on the other side of resistance, fear, avoidance, and frustration – a state of being that has become one of my most important reasons for living. 

And you know what? That ~$18k I made all came from my creative passions. It came from 

-My first ever painting commissions and painting sales ($500-$1000 each),

-Making a hilarious, wild and profound graphic novel series with a genius pre-teen,

-Facilitating creative expression classes for Black, brown, and Asian American youth,

-And my first ever singing job, being a professional Christmas caroler for parties, restaurants, and city events. 

I can honestly say I loved every moment of it. And that feels worth celebrating. 

That self-portrait story, you you hadn’t already guessed, is just one story of many creative challenges of my year. 

There’s the story of my first Burning Man, where we forgot the floor of our tent and had to deal with torrential rain.

There’s the story of my life as a Christmas caroler, where I had to learn 110 holiday songs and then sing for up to six hours a day through the whole month of December, almost losing my voice in the process and figuring out how to sing through it. 

And of course, each and every painting has its own story, its own unique way of speaking to me and challenging me to see more deeply, to push my comfort zone, to create what has never been created before. 

In 2024, I’m going to continue to surrender myself to the mysterious, magical flow of creativity and see where it takes me. I know I’ll continue to go to places beyond the imaginings of anything I could dream up today.