Touch

    So now I've gotten comfortable enough working with the emulsion that I've begun to do more large scale works, even though using so much of the emulsion at one time kind of makes me cringe!  The last piece I completed, even though it did not turn out anything like I had planned or expected, had revealed an entirely new direction in which to take my art. 

    In this piece, titled Touch, I draw upon one of the most vivid and powerful memories: the events leading up to my first kiss.  At this point in my life, I was struggling greatly with the knowledge of  my sexuality and the fear of the consequences from my family.  At this time, my father vehemently forbid any expression of being gay, and forced me to go to therapy in order to correct the mental illness I was suffering from.  However, myself, being as strong-willed and bullheaded as he, knew that this was not going to change.  I had known my orientation from the age of 10, and had spent the previous 5 years concealing it and dealing with the emotional consequences on my own.  But this suppression had a backlash, creating an obsessive desire to find someone, to touch, to express these terrible desires that were forbidden, and yet pulling at my core as potently as the desire to survive.  When I finally found someone who was capable of returning my affections when I was 15, you cannot imagine the excitement, the relief of knowing I was not alone, that overwhelmed my senses.  Yet, even still, I was terrified of my father and what the knowledge of this discovery would do at home.  And then that summer, at a friend's birthday party in Galveston, I found myself outside with him out on the patio overlooking the ocean with a strong warm breeze washing over us and the sounds of the crashing waves drowning out everything but us in this electric moment.  At first we were just talking, each safe in our own sleeping bags, but the longer we looked into each others eyes the more irresistible the pull became, until suddenly we were holding each others arms.  Each of us were so desperate to touch one another and share this simple contact and yet so horrified at the thought.  Him with the backlash of religion and me from the strong boot of my father pressing on me. 

And then he kissed me. 

There has not been another moment in my life when the touch of another has filled me with so much thrill, so much wanting and need, than in that moment, and it is such things that I now feel the confidence in myself to express outwardly in my art. 

    Here was my process:
I laid a foundation of an oil based primer with my hands upon cloth, using my body to throw and spread the paint, leaving traces of my palms and fingers across the material.  I then used a paint roller to cover this with emulsion, almost erasing the traces with the medium I would then use to capture my body and that of Gavin, in the position that mimicked my memory.  Because the emulsion was a bit tacky, and because it could not bond properly with the oil primer, the contact with our bodies loosed in and caused it to tear where it contacted our skin, and later while processing, giant holes appeared.  The image has become a mirror or the emotional turbulence I had felt, a suppressed desire to touch, covered with a superficial appearance that was slowly degrading under the power of this primal need.