If we’ve never met and you’re reading Hues News for the first time, this post is where I’d want us to start our relationship. I’ll tell you some things about me and my goals with writing this, and you can decide what to do with it from there. It won’t be for everyone, and that’s okay — cause, it’s mostly for me anyway.
Rule #1, I write how I speak. I use too many commas. (And parenthesis) — and these thingies, cause I love a good moment of pause. I WILL misspell things, not proof read 100% correctly and do other things to annoy people who care about such things. I love the grammar gang, you are needed in the world to keep our communication clear and everyone on the same page with how we use the written language. Love that for you and for the world — but that’s not how I’ll be doing things here.
#2: The opinions expressed here are solely my own. No brand or collaborator or fan of my artwork should be held responsible for anything I say here. Not that I’m trying to be controversial at all, but if something does offend you— I’m the problem, it’s me. I take all the blame.
#3: We’re here to have fun while I explore this new digital journal to express myself. I’ll be doing some writing through text, some audio recordings, some crossover combinations of different types of multimedia, and whatever else I decide to try.
Summary: I’m gonna do and say what I want. I hope you enjoy that. If not, there are plenty of other places on the internet to go. Bless. Be well!
Now to the “WHY”.
Well… to put it simply, I think about death a lot. Narcissistically, I think about what my legacy will be. What will be left of me when I move on to the next plane of existence. Many of my favorite artists throughout history were beloved because I got into their heads. They wrote journals or had biographies written about them that explained more of the brain behind the art. The goal for any piece of art is always for it to make an impact on its own, but I hope that by digging into my brain folds a bit, I can help better explain WHO I am and WHY I am, for anyone who cares.
Since I was young, I always desired to be understood. I grew up in a world that didn’t feel like mine. I felt I was born an outcast, too different from most people to ever be truly understood. I spent a lot of time in solitude, playing alone, drawing, thinking about why I was so different. I was SO very sensitive, and for a long time I didn’t know if anyone would genuinely want to be my friend. I had some fantastic girl friends at school / church (many of whom I still keep up with today) but sometimes I thought those relationships were merely circumstantial. Like they were only friends with me because we were confined to the same cement rooms.
At the dawn of social media, I started to share myself more freely. I was able to connect with other queer folks around the world. I got to meet other weirdos and outcasts who grew up with those same feelings of solitude and loneliness. I felt a brand new sense of self, and baby I RAN with it. I shared on my tumblr and twitter CONSTANTLY. Even back in the day before all the apps. When you had to like text a photo and a caption to “04440” (or something like that) for it to be posted. I was sharing my life in real time, in a way that most people weren’t doing yet, because we were still confined to doing most social sharing from our desktop computers. I was running wild with it and having so much fun sharing my world. The best part though was the likes, the comments, the shares. The positive reinforcement. Those little clicks that meant someone out there saw me and LIKED me. I was addicted.
Now, in this the year of 2024, I’ve fallen out of love with my social addiction. I’ve realized that those little likes and clicks are designed to give us that dopamine hit and trick us into behaving a certain way. For instance, I knew that my posts would perform better on Tuesday, Thursday and Friday mornings. So, I would save things to post at those times. Innocent enough. But I also knew that video content would perform better. And it would be best if it were between 5 and 15 seconds. And it would be best if it started with a bold color, like yellow. It would be better if it didn’t include text in the image, but if I used 5-6 hashtags in the post copy.
At the beginning when I was just sharing shenanigans with my friends, making crafting videos and judging food and clubs around NYC and LA, it was easy to be lighthearted and fun. Eventually, as I started to share my art more on my social accounts, it turned into a more vulnerable place where I had to constantly explain what I made and why. And though I’ve made a ton of work I’m incredibly proud of and am a personal fan of, the social sharing of it all was affecting the artwork. By the time it became a “if you’re not posting AT LEAST 3-5 times a week it’s not even worth it” I was simply exhausted. I kept up with that life for a while. On top of my day job. On top of trying to be thoughtful about what I was painting or designing. On top of meetings and planning and paperwork and accounting and taxes and everything else it took to run my “side hustle” as an artist — I was still able to do the work of a full-time social media team and plan and edit and write copy for 3-5 posts per week (most weeks). Until last October… when I decided that I would finish putting out the content I had saved up (in anticipation of a campaign I was working on with a brand I genuinely like) and then I just knew in my heart that I couldn’t keep up with it anymore.
I wrote a separate post about what was going on between October and now, but the short story is that I reached max capacity of things I could handle, and social media was the thing I needed to cut out to protect my mental health. I decided that the 3-5 posts a week thing DEFINITELY wasn’t gonna happen. That it didn’t need to happen. That it literally did not matter at all.
So now we’re here, a new way to keep in touch. A safer space for me to be me and share myself in my own way, on my own time. I’ll post my new artwork and musings here, and hopefully some folks will read them and gain a deeper understanding of who I am. And if not… at least I tried.