The City: Love Letters To NYC
“Living is a form of not being sure, not knowing what next or how. The moment you know, you begin to die a little. The artist never entirely knows. We guess. We may be wrong, but we take leap after leap in the dark.”
Foreword
Creative force behind ZSO. Multidisciplinary artist. Person of extremes. Another lost soul in NYC.
Preface
Officially school brought me to New York, but unofficially, I just wanted to live here, so I only applied to NYU and got in early for a writing and art portfolio. I loved the university and couldn’t believe I’d gotten my shot at New York City. Getting into plenty of trouble was a part of it too – that’s what you do in NYC when you’re 20. Around my senior year, I started teaching myself Photoshop and experimenting with digital arts, and somehow managed to get a design job out of school with very limited skills. Looking back, I wish I knew how lucky I was at the time to even just get a chance. I knew I couldn’t make enough money right out of school to live off of art (nor did I know the first thing about how to go about it), but I always kept up my own art practice nights and weekends. I started a website and blog right when all that was relatively new and got enough recognition within small illustration circles to get a few freelance illustration jobs while working my day job during the week. I said yes to anything that came my way, slept very little, and continued to develop my illustration style.
About five years ago, my interest started to shift and I began having a really hard time drawing. It took a long time to stop beating myself up and realize that I’d lost an interest in the illustration style I’d spent the last decade exploring. Instead, I started getting more hungry for different visual styles and other mediums such as music and writing. Eventually, these interests started to meet as a new personal project where writing became the primary medium, with art playing much more of a supporting role. Initially, I envisioned this project as a mix of writing, art and spoken words, but by the time I hit about 40,000 words I realized it had turned into something bigger and more challenging than I’d ever expected. Soon enough I realized this project wasn’t going to be done any time soon, so in the meantime I decided to find a way to create much smaller moments of completion along the way. I’d grown so fond of the little rush you get when you finish a drawing from my illustration days, but writing a novel-length story would take years, not days. Naivety serves you well when you embark on a difficult process involving endless self-doubt and countless rewrites. Sometimes it’s easier to stay in the dark, not knowing how hard something can eventually get.
It was around my second draft of the story project that I started posting standalone poems, short essays and collages to an old domain I’d bought years ago. The intention was just to finish something bite-sized where I could get a small taste of accomplishing something as well as build the momentum I needed to finish the bigger project that I was always chipping away at on the side. If I don't make something creative or personal every week or two, I really feel like I'm dying or useless. Poems were also a great way to experiment with my voice and visual taste. I hardly shared them with anyone, but it was enough just to produce them. As a result, Love Letters to NYC ended up becoming a constant work in progress and a digital bulletin board of written experiments.
The name Love Letters to NYC is a bit of another story altogether. When I was still making illustrations, I had a public art idea to go around the city and leave a piece of art behind for anyone to pick up and keep. In New York, one person's trash is another person's treasure, and I loved the idea of abandoning something looking almost like trash to see if anyone else would pick it up. On the back of each piece, I wrote a little confessional style letter addressed to New York. Since I never got to see the outcome, I used the website as a place to keep a living record of the art and letters with a photo of where they'd been placed. That was where the site started, but now it’s just the poems and collages, though NYC is still very much infused. Many of the poems were triggered by little scenes of the city that somehow felt unique to living here: a man playing a saxophone on 5th Avenue as I walked to an appointment, feeling in love or heartbroken in a city of over eight million, random scenes from bars, or from just watching strangers interact. Other times the poems weren’t serious at all, so I started writing sarcastic haikus that only New Yorkers could truly laugh at, and I included so-called visual poems made of cut paper, acrylic, and digital collage, which is ultimately a way to play with a language much different than my illustration. Using only simple textures and shapes is very similar to the concept of a poem where you give a viewer or reader the outlines of a concept and let them fill in the rest. Something about a poem feels like a puzzle, and when you place its last word in place, it's almost like solving the problem you’re struggling with, or at least figuring out the ways to let it go.
Epilogue
My goal for this project is for it to be whatever it wants to be. If one person reads a poem and feels something, there’s nothing more I could ask for. As far as my plans go, I’m considering adding an audio element so that people can not only read, but also hear the poems. I love the work of Marie Howe and David Whyte, and their poems always take on a new life to me when I can hear them read in the poet’s own voice.
The only time I’ve ever been so affected by a piece of art was when I saw a Picasso exhibition and found myself crying inexplicably, being deeply inspired by how many times he was willing to be born and die as an artist. Most people don’t even know that at some point Picasso stopped making art and started writing plays and poems. I love the fact that he valued poetry and genuinely thought he’d be more well-remembered for it, yet very few people know about it.
Bibliography
The City
Favorite thing about living in New York ↝ If you can figure out how to make a life here, you can probably figure out how to make a life anywhere. Walking at night in the summer with a buzz. Poetry on every corner.
One thing you can't survive without in the city ↝ Tie between small business, public art, and random acts of kindness
Three adjectives describing New York ↝ Resilient, inventive, absurd
The most inspiring spot in the city ↝ Washington Square Park, MoMA, Natural History Museum
Current obsession ↝ Luis Barragán // Bardo Pond // Murakami // Jim Jarmusch // Hildur Guðnadóttir
