To me, every artist or anyone I meet really has “that place”. The place where they can go to escape it all and leave behind their reality in order to discharge thoughts or raw emotion which the world seems to not understand. It can be a happy, painful or serene place to be but it is somewhere to recollect one’s self in a finer form of self-care.

I began to construct my art world when I was developing more complex thoughts and feelings. I had found out my outlet of sports was not longer a path for me due to an injury. I used to get so lost in pitching and focusing on a team to get to a common goal but now the basball field was no longer an option. Searching for some type of an outlet i found myself getting lost in a depression and being angry for many reasons aside from losing baseball. After some time I took a summer school class for creatic comics In high school and this became a turning point for me. I had always drawn but never created and in this class, we had to a write a story, develop characters etc…Here is a game changer and I found myself growing in art. Anything from sketching, writing, sculpting or painting there was just so much I was able to do.

In my world I am surrounded by forest, there are so many noises from creatures I’ve known in the real world but now there are noises of some I have yet to create. There is a tree Rasta who plays any form of music known to humanity and he is always learning new ways to tell his musical stories to influence my own. The wind is a mystical rage and she brings me so many good feelings and vibes. The water is my source of energy beats filling everything with its fuel to live, it is my heart beat and flow of emotion that can be calm or fierce. The fire is in my hand with every hope to turn my first line into something bright and full of life.  This world helps me think and rediscover what I am capable of. It helps me grow and fail constantly and when I am in it .. I hear and see nothing of the real world because this is the reality of my imagination and it is real in it of itself. However, I did lose this world … It took me a while but I figured out how.

General life tends to take you from this world and sometimes you lose it by being consumed by other things that are deemed “more important”. Relationships happen, traffic happens (lol) , Deaths, losses, work.. let’s just say it REALITY!!!.  I lost myself and began to give up my craft for things I thought I loved and convinced myself was actual love. I stopped taking care of myself, I stopped loving myself and I continually gave my emotions and heart out to many people who cared in the beginning but eventually what they loved was how convenient I made their lives. It was my own undoing and in the end, when I crashed… I crashed hard affecting everything around me. I failed someone that meant a lot to me but I also failed to see we had lost one another years before I let myself see it. Reality became my world and living and working in it broke me and took me from the creativity and moral compass I had constructed when in my Art world.

I now see how important it is to be an individual and not lose your world to someone else’s. The brilliance of going through this was there is always a light and in this case, my friends and family were that light. I had always asked when I fall who is going to be there to catch me. I had not realized I created this net of friends who stopped me from falling to a place I may have never risen from. My body and soul had never felt so limp and wasteful and all those times I was there to help I was getting that help back 10 fold… I can not erase my failure as lover, friend, son or brother but moving forward I am able to comprehend how important I am and how vital it is to find the worth in myself . I had expected others to make me feel that worth in some faulted journey of approval addiction.

Here I am 396 days after the start of my new adventure. I have gone back in time with myself and “dwelled” so far into my past to learn the who, what, where why’s and how’s. I have returned to a broken Art world that is redeveloping and growing again. Old faces have returned and new ones are surfacing. Rasta tree has learned so much more to play for me and im now in constant pursuit of how to grow, learn, and flourish as a wonderful human being.  My art world is now blended with the understanding to reality in order to find a new way to just understanding life. I now understand I am worth something and the more I actually love and appreciate myself I can not only do that the right way for others but they, in turn, choose to reciprocate that appreciation.

“The world you find in yourself is the world that becomes all that surrounds you” – C-Jac