I got a condolence message from a friend who told me that I would see my Grandma in Heaven, and he looks forward to that for me.

I think he just told me he looks forward to my death XD

i see you creating and planning and Thinking. you’ve made characters with attention and uhhh scrutiny, with so much care that they feel real, less like a tale with a lesson, and more like an account recorded long ago. i see your work, and i see so many places where you made distinct and thoughtful choices—in color, lighting, shape, but also in positions, and perspectives, and shots, to the point where your pieces evolve into a sort of choreography. there’s motion and movement and apparel, elements that communicate so much nuance and greatly carry some implications, and i feel like that’s an incredible sort of attention, a quality of skill most marvelous. there’s an emotion and mood in your pieces (especially with avery and/or ansel) that i feel is very unique and distinct, and whether it’s intentional or intuitive, it always seems very… thorough. so fleshed out and multitudinous. i’m sorry for being incoherent, but i mean to say that your work is full of depth and creative thought, and it’s a depth and creativity that is so elegantly suffused into your work that i often miss it, but has suddenly become so apparent to me. there’s that piece with avery with his head on the table with a cup of water in front of him (heat wave?); the expression on his face, combined with the positon of his folded arms and head slumped on top of them, create a figure who exudes exhaustion (which sounds oxymoronic), and then you placed a cup of water in front of him, and let our sight of his face pass through it, so that his eyes not only look at the cup with a mixture of misery and desperation, but also to the audience with a plea, for reprieve from his anguish. and you did all the lines in redder hues and used a warm yellow for the tile and water (instead of a blue!!) and surrounded the work in a red frame, which (alongside the red lines) well communicate that feeling of relentless heat. the entire work is like an ode to misery of those hot summer days where the sun is trying to bake you alive and the air is trying to crush you with a weight of a boulder, and it’s so succinctly captured with one person, one object, and a bare setting. which is just super awesome!! that skill, of creating a picture that captures the atmosphere of the moment like that, is just in such great quality within you. it’s true of all your pieces, and i feel that there is a great amount of deliberation for these productions, and i feel that it comes together all so nicely! with such grace and completeness do your pieces appear, that an observer would first believe a piece to be a real moment in time before a choreographed design. i can see your genius in your art, and i find it tremendously impressive. your art captures and displays a range of themes and moods, and each one can stand singularly with a thematic might. i feel somewhat abashed for not recognizing i your creative process before now, but i hope that you know that the depths and multitudes within you, and which you have put into your work, indeed reach the eye with profundity and impact, and that your works are something i remember, and keep in mind when doing my own works of art.

i saw this in my inbox this morning and have been debating whether to even post it, because it somehow feels selfish to post it (it's incredibly positive towards me), but also selfish to keep it hidden in my inbox and never let you know how i felt reading it. but i think i need to post it after all, since you took the time to write all this, and i want to show my appreciation. thank you for truly looking at my art through such a thoughtful lens, and writing such beautiful prose and analyses. you made me notice things about my own art that i probably wouldn't have noticed, artistic decisions that i may have subconsciously made. i'm going to come back and read this message again whenever i feel bad about my art in the future, or when i feel cringe about posting my oc work again, and remind myself that there's at least one viewer out there who is understanding it 💛

(heat wave)