ubu

I studied art and philosophy at Clemson University, where I graduated cum laude in 2005.  I got involved with the visual arts in 2001 and discovered my affection for color, texture, and painting in 2002.  I began doing freelance web design & development in 2004, and since 2006 that been my primary source of income.  Presently, I am active as a painter, somewhat active as a photographer, and nostalgic about thrown pottery.

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When people ask me what "I do," I typically try to minimize my career.  There is a part of me that delights in flustering expectations, so when someone asks me what I do, I prefer to wiggle a bit and center my identity on my role as a lover of God and people rather than my roles as an artist and web developer.   Having said that...

Without God, the Father of Jesus, my life would be a puddle of muck.  Here is how I might describe myself were it not for Him rescuing me from the destructive things which I once preferred: fiercely arrogant yet deeply insecure; profoundly enslaved to a need to be right, justified, and superior to others; severe; exploitative of friendships; hyper-critical of others; entitled; neurotically egocentric and vain; enslaved to approval from others; sexually unsatisfiable and lascivious; not loyal to any relationship; truly excellent at convincing anyone of my nobility and your fault; utterly out of sync with the reality within which we all live, breathe, and move; and synchronizing myself more and more with an American culture which, on the basis of its own misery, has no authority or expertise on how to live well.

Mmm.  How wonderful that what you just read is my epitaph!  My new life is very different now, courtesy of a living God-man named Jesus, who is my King and my Brother.  Sorry to freak you out with my crazy Jesus jabber, but best I can tell, you should be punting my gonads if I'm gonna try and sit here and write out a quick summary of my life without giving Him credit up front.  I'd have no integrity at all if I didn't acknowledge Him outright.

Life today is flippin' exotic and loaded with joy and grace and peace.  I love wading deeper into what it means to live a life devoted to Jesus and others.  He is so worthy of being pursued, and I do this very much in tandem with others.  One of my biggest joys is seeing the people I love be freed and taken closer to wholeness, and I get to see it continuously.  I have this great job / self-employment thing where I work at home as an artist and web developer in such a way that I am able to give my time and resources to others liberally.  God has immersed me in a family of beautiful sisters and brothers who inspire me and care for me as I care for them, and I absolutely delight in this.

Life is very musical for me.  I love to listen to music, and I love to hit things in rhythm.  My preference for music is matched by my preference for quiet, and I spend a generous amount of time without noise, which I guess is a wee bit odd.  When the weather is suitable, I love to casually longboard and observe trees.  I love doing things with my hands, too.  I love building things, repairing things, and creating things with my hands.  I love to be interested in things, fascinated by things, and learning things.  I can also eat cookies like a maniac - providing they are delicious.

So there.  I hope you don't mind, but I just don't feel compelled to keep writing about myself.  Perhaps we can hang sometime and continue this in person?  I'd love to learn about you and talk about God with you.  Feel free to email me about whatever.  And if you're considering hiring me, do it *jedi hand motion*.

I think there is a part of every introvert that aspires to mystery.  If you will allow me to generalize, I think we are drawn to the idea of not being fully known.  Even in the presence of those dearest to us - those who may even grasp our own personal dynamic to an extent that we might find shocking, we still treasure the notion that there will always remain some parts of us that are as yet unrevealed – a notion often paradoxically accompanied by a volcanic desire to be deeply, intimately known.

I feel this to a great degree.  Fortunately for me, John writes in the Bible that we must diminish so that Jesus may become greater – Himself the universal pinnacle of the mysterious and the unfathomable.  I have great reluctance in describing myself in so public a place as this, feeling the egocentricity of the whole activity and lack of genuine relationship.  But for the sake of convention, for the sake of my private inquisitors who visit this website, and for the sake of my own paradoxical desires, here are some life-historical things that are responsible for me creating the art you have found here.


Preeminently, it was music.  Myself as a piano player was utterly foundational in the formation of my identity.  It was as a child pianist that I learned how to draw energy from my own activities – the nurturing ground for my introversion.  In high school I began making music with a local band and did so for about six years.  Those experiences characterized those years of my life.  Having spent a lot of time in a recording studio making albums and performing at popular local venues yielded a great deal of musical fruit, as well as a heaping mound of ambition.  (I might even trace further back to my involvement with martial arts, which began well before I began playing the piano and informed a great deal of my view towards playing the piano and its value for my life.  But I'll leave it at that.)

It was my freshman year at Clemson University in 2000 when my immediate family abruptly dissolved due to my father's unexpected death and the rampant use of alcohol in my family.  I subsequently underwent a thorough, intense revision of my priorities and decided to leave computer science and pursue the visual arts while in college (a decision complexly but definitively attributed to my commitment to music).  My computer science major can been seen as a manifestation of my long held computer skills, which may give insight to my trade work as a freelance web developer and designer.

This intense period of my life motivated me to start writing poetry only days after Dad's death – a prior untouched activity.  This correlated with my involvement with visual arts.  Having already learned something about how to nurture at the piano my own introspective and contemplative processes, the value of these visual, written, and musical art forms became intimately known to me through experience and were essential to my coping with the stress of the following years.  Presently, it is my relationship with Christ, his followers, and my involvement with these arts that are tantamount to food and sleep in their daily importance for my life.

Today, I make meager income doing sporadic freelance web work.  It's a great gig.  Being able to devote a large portion of my time to creating art is a long term goal, and I have been able to track gradual process in this over the past year as I have begun actively displaying and selling my paintings, in addition to renovating several rooms in my house to studio space.

I also have somewhat of a love-hate relationship with philosophy.  I certainly could not appropriately write a biographical snippet of my life and not include something about my philosophical pursuits.  But for now I will only offer that philosophy has long held a place of tremendous importance in my life, and I am in the process of reexamining the importance I have placed in philosophical cultivation at the expense of other priorities.

I happily claim each of these involvements as my own very special means to the pursuit of loving God and loving others: visual, written, and musical art forms, career, philosophical endeavors, and physical activities such as martial arts, drums, and ultimate frisbee.  And it is this criterion of what is of true value that I seek to impose on all my activities.  Know that the things on this website, even if only faintly, and even those works of poetry which are evidence of the struggles that I have experienced in my relationship with Our Father, are in some way a celebration of the creativity of our God which He chose to make fundamental to our nature when He created us in His beautiful likeness.  So be it!

An artist recently wrote me a note and asked "What do you believe about God?" Below is my brief response.


God is about freedom on every scale. Huge stuff and small stuff. Thinking things are really important that actually aren't important at all. Thinking things are satisfying that keep you from the stuff in life that really satisfies. Dependence. Wrapping up our identity in things that are poisonous but continually entice us. Worry. Anxiety. Stress. Death. Freedom to die your hair blue. Freedom to dance until your cheeks cramp up from smiling too much. Freedom to celebrate small things like a child might. Freedom from fear. Freedom to perceive beauty in things that most folks never notice. My God, if He is about anything, I believe it is about freedom.

He's about satisfying, too. Hell, it's one of the ways He accomplishes freedom. He satisfies us with the real, lasting stuff. And when we are briefly satisfied by the stuff that leaves us more thirsty and hurt than when we started, God wants to bring us out of that pattern of living. I believe God invented life and people. He designed the whole thing. I believe He has some (to put it mildly) good insight into how to live life well.

God is Himself pure, unrestrained, compassionate love. I believe the longing we each experience for physical and emotional intimacy is there because in many ways we are just like Him. He longs for intimacy with us, and I believe I am able to speak and think and act in ways that bring Him delight. And sorrow.

Ask some dude to throw out some adjectives about Jesus, you get a bunch of good stuff. Ask that dude to throw out some adjectives about Christians, you get a bunch of garbage. If I say "Alaska is the largest state in America," you would immediately understand that I am stating something factual, deliberate, and not exaggerated. Well, in the same way, I can say that I believe that the fact that following Jesus has inherited the putrid reputation of 'Christianity' is the greatest tragedy that my mind can conceive. If I can say I hate anything, I hate this. If the whole world decided that music was worthless, boring, and always sounded terrible, and you and I were the only ones who understood the absolutely profound wrongness of it all, well then our experience might be something similar to what I'm talking about.

I also believe that while God is infinite and incomprehensible, I believe that as a part of his being infinite, He has the power to also be exceedingly accessible and relatable. I think Jesus has something to do with this. And I don't believe that God can be customized. He has a character – just as we do. He desires to be known by others – just as we do. And I don't believe He has been silent to us about who He is.

I believe God loves for us to create. I believe He creates because He takes joy in creating out of his own inexhaustible generosity. Because we are in so many ways much like Him, I believe creating things (art, children, conversation, thoughts, relationships...) are holy acts. Holy because they are much greater than themselves and deeply connected to spiritual realities.

Lastly, I believe that Malt-o-Meal's knock off of Cinnamon Toast Crunch is hands-down the best off-brand imitation cereal available at your local grocery store. I passionately believe that I'm going to go eat some.

gray, as the long and simple skirt you so often wear in modest display of your extraordinary beauty
green, as most of what you used to wear before so much of it became gray
gray, as my favorite color
sandy tan and granite, as the mood of the song you recommended for me, which repeats as I write
white, as the thick stripes on your otherwise gray shirt
green, as the t-shirt you wore with your gray skirt as I sat with you to tell you that for now, it's not for us.
clear, as the wetness of my eyes which drips for a God who loves you so much better than I do
pink, as I watched the corners of your eyes change while you listened to me tell you how beautiful you are
chocolate, as your dog, who gives you kisses, and the turtle you gave me before I left
pink, as I was flush, working out for my future wife who wouldn't think that I am skinny.
clear, for a God who is my strength and your beauty
green and black, because it's more coffee shop than pink
purple, as the stripe on your green painting, which needed a focal point
chocolate, as the frame I made for you, which was for her
white, for fullness, for patience, for our new clothes
gray, for temporary dimness, for patience, for your clothes,
and for the tension that will stay
until He shows who he has in mind for us

There is a lake which, many times in the past, I would visit when feeling wistful, when longing for largeness.  Many times I would sit on its shore and just be.  It was where I came when I sought a place to be distilled - by beauty and rest - from the pollution I acquire while living apart from beauty and rest; a place to remind me that I am indeed meaningfully connected to this world.

I tell you this because a short time ago I discovered something.  I discovered something near to this familiar place which for a long time I overlooked.  At first the discovery was merely an incidental point of interest, a newfound feature of my familiar, beloved place.  It was something glanced upon then left in favor of my familiar view by the lake.  But gradually, with increasing intensity, and following my discovery, my relationship to this place changed.


What I discovered was a home - a beautiful home tucked away but not far from the shore.  And while I used to long to visit this shore for its largeness, now, when I am away, I long to return that I might know this home's smallness more fully, as one who is more than a foreign admirer.  Curiously, I sensed a great largeness within the smallness of the home, so that my great change has been this: that the object of my desire is now much more intimate, much different than what for so long was a desire for wide-open spaces and its accompanying wide-open sort of beauty.  Now what I long for is much more personal, a more unique and soul-tailored experience of space and beauty which quite successfully competes for my mind's attention while away.


It seemed at first to be just a simple, inquisitive admiration.  I would arrive at the shore and walk to the home to admire and be inspired by its tree shade, its gardens, its form, color, smells, and quirkiness.  I delighted in noticing new things, just as a person who loves finds special pleasure in new knowledge of the beloved, like a tree-lover who has found an uncommon tree in some nearby woods, or a chess-lover who has uncovered a new strategy.  As my affection for all these things grew, it finally flowed into an indulgent imagination of what might be within, and what a life together might look like.  Something that I didn't know existed only a short time earlier now held my affection captive.


I judged that no one lived in the home, or perhaps more precisely and perplexingly, that it was likely occupied by some beautiful unseen entity.  If such an inference leads you to imagine its lawn and gardens and exterior to be unkempt, I must protest.  Lacking explanation, all I can say is that it is both true that no person lives within, and true that something unseen keeps this home strikingly beautiful, warm, and inviting to an admirer such as myself.  Eventually, I welcomed my own articulation that I was indeed enamored by this home, that when I was away from it, I found satisfaction in the knowledge that I would encounter it again, and in my most free moments, I indulged that perhaps eventually it might become my own home.


Presently, I am very well acquainted with an undeniable, almost palpable tension that exists in my relationship to this home.  It seems that for me to live there would be immensely beautiful, but I am convinced that it could not happen soon.  In the complexity of my life away from this place, there are many things that keep me as a simple visitor and admirer.  I am sometimes consoled by the thought that perhaps in a few years, circumstances might change, and my life could, in due time, center itself on this home.  But my consolation is met with a sobering awareness that in the coming years, I may find myself drawn to another place, a new discovery, one even more so meant for myself.  In a few years, or in a few weeks, I may be led by my own unseen spirit to dwell elsewhere, and the possibility of living in this beautiful place by the shore would end.  Or perhaps my life would continue as is, but in time, another might discover this magnificent home on the shore and seek to live within, himself without hindrance, and he, too, welcomed.  As such, my possibility with it would end.  And this must be okay.


So today, in my current home, I must simply wait.  I will wait for the right timing, and I will consider myself free to be led to other places, as my adored is free to be discovered and treasured by another.