The past few weeks I keep asking myself, “What is my practice"? I want to define my practice because I believe it is helpful to put all the thoughts in your brain into text. The act of writing often helps me realize new thoughts and ideas I was not able to access through just thinking. I also like the archival quality to it, and think writing about what my practice is as a nineteen-year-old is a kind thing to do for my older self.

I think your artistic practice is the way you live your life, and the things that matter to you. These greatly influence the art you make. My friend Plum says driving is part of her practice. The strange food combinations I often make (tuna + popcorn, green tea + lettuce) are part of my practice for sure. I am beginning to think that life is lived in all these very small moments and then the small moments make up how you live. That’s the argument I gave my grandmother when I told her I wanted us to eat on her mother’s nice china. We eat sliced oranges on blue painted plates and sit on the outside balcony, facing the parking lot and listen to Tchaikovsky, and those are the small things that make up how you live, like peeling, boiling, drying, and repeeling fava beans one by one with your friend or taking the long walk back from work and complimenting the neighbors on their pretty houses. I have spent the summer biking and reading, eating veggies from the CSA box and drawing portraits at the farmer’s market.

I have also spent the summer sitting at my desk in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, interning and designing and working but mostly talking. I arrived on a hot day and met my smart and talented coworkers over bright pink borscht and watermelon iced tea. I am a design intern, which means I was told to go around and make stuff, and be inspired and self-led. The startup I’ve been waking up early to take a train, then two subways, and a walk to is called Putty. We work on computerized desks in a larger office with other creative people. I tell my mother about the other things the cool people in the office are making, like the red plastic camera that churns out poems instead of images, or the computer where the screen is the real world and the files are paper. She does not understand. I cannot explain why I want a hand-crank-powered open source e-reader, but I do. I paused while writing this to google about when I can buy fresh figs. It is important to me to only eat fruit while it is in season.

At our office, I quickly got to work making friends with the other inhabitants. There are a variety of teachers, writers, ceramicists, computer scientists, and designers who drop by on occasion, each of which has some kind of practice. Many have personal websites, which I think are a good way to define one’s practice. I think to make something, you have to believe in something. At the very least, you have to believe in some better world, where the thing you are making exists. You have to believe in yourself. I think back to last fall, where I made a chair. I had never made a chair before. How did I make a chair? I think through patience, and believing. Part of making something is trusting something ugly, like three boards of lumber, and seeing it through into something beautiful. Your work of art of choice will not look good at first, and you must transcend this preliminary trial. To make something bad into good, you must stick with it, and face many more trials. Often, these include breaking of skin, or sweat dripping down your body as you chisel into hardwood, calluses on your fingers and an aching back after a day spent drawing, paint and charcoal deep under your nails, sawdust in your nose, your fingers still stained with ink days later. I miss these when I am at the office typing away to Claude.

Oftentimes when people ask what kind of art I make I have trouble saying one thing, or I give them a long list of various media. Once you have certain skills they become immensely transferrable to other media. The skills it takes to make and release a video game, art direction, sound design, animation, code and mathematics, marketing, and writing are extremely similar to the process of making a chair from three pieces of cherry hardwood, or creating a portraiture business. I like to consider the total identity of the artwork while making it, what is the thing? What am I exploring? What does this artwork look, feel, sound, and smell like? How does this artwork make a person feel? It’s helpful to define these things, but the answers do not always need to be public. There is certainly some good in letting your audience discover these feelings and answers for themselves! My practice is generally driven by two fundamental ambitions: looseness, and friction.

Looseness is the possibility of an in-between. On Twitter, a few years back there was a discussion about the possibility that a low-resolution video or video game of snow felt ‘colder’ than a high-resolution representation of snow. This is similar to the way Monet’s Water Lilies oil paintings feel more like standing over a bridge and watching a beautiful garden pond than an iPhone 16 photo of water lilies. Or, how a charcoal drawing of a dancer with visible marks and lines can feel more alive and energetic than a smooth and well-blended drawing of the same performer. A higher resolution or stronger likeness with the human eye does not necessarily make a work greater or more special.

Imagery that gives the viewer less information often imparts more feeling, because the viewer’s brain does the job of creating thought between empty or dark space. Part of this means our job as artists is trusting our viewers, and trusting they will engage with our work on a serious level. If we trust them, they often will! Pixels, lines, color, sound, brushstrokes; almost any piece of media or tool available to an artist can be used to create a sense of feeling and emotion that generates looseness. This looseness is created simply by not defining every strict point. This can even exist in 3D work, where you can simply decide not to say exactly what everything is.

The looseness in my portrait service Heirloom Portraits exists when everyone moves their chairs around to sit differently, or the way their face changes when they shift smiles or the shadows change in the morning sun. The fluidity in the animations of my low-resolution pixel-art game MUDBIRD allow for a feeling of lushness. This looseness is everywhere in the real world, because in a forest you cannot always tell which leaf is from which tree, or where one place begins and another one ends. It is one of my favorite things.

Society has imparted certain rigidities and boundaries which do not exist in nature, and it is perhaps our job (as artists) to acknowledge these boundaries and create work that helps to reconstitute human connection with the environment. A friend told me that the greatest danger to artists is climate change, because all art is inspired from the environment, and without a beautiful world we would have no art to make. I don’t really know if I agree but I think the sentiment is certainly a little bit true. I recently watched this fantastic Canadian documentary from 1984 called Waterwalker, about Bill Mason, a canoeist and outdoorsman. Mason often paints these gorgeous landscapes of Northern Lake Superior, his home and the location of the documentary. That said, his paintings are not great, and he does not really identify as an ‘artist’. Looseness also exists in the range of definition between ‘artist’ and ‘person’ and it is hard to separate the two because if having a practice is the way you live, everyone has a practice, and so everyone is an artist. (Most people will deny this.)

Friction is the difficulty that gives things meaning. Only eating fruit while in season, taking the long way home, leaving the air conditioning off in the summer, these allow us to appreciate the wonders of the world far more acutely. Choosing to wait and experience temporary discomfort helps us appreciate life’s pleasures. Friction is how after you’ve had a cold for a long while, and your nose has been clogged, you hold the act of breathing with a respect and reverence you would otherwise forget. I like to hold this thought while artmaking. I am very inspired to make websites that close at certain hours of the day, or build technology that encourages time and energy to be spent. I also like to embrace these frictions in the act of artmaking itself, and I tend to avoid copy-pasting as much as I can when making digital work. A part of embracing friction is working with the media itself, which means accepting and using the difficult qualities of paint, charcoal, or code when desirable. This leads to art that has a sense of oneness with its media, which I find extremely admirable. One of my favorite pieces of artwork, Untitled (Double Rauschenberg), by Robert Rauschenberg and Susan Weil maintains this kind of oneness with the cyanotype they use. The image is simply of Rauschenberg and Weil lying down on a large piece of paper blocking out sunlight, but the intimacy and composition of the work could only have been created by cyanotype. It is powerful to use the media you are working in to create meaning. Friction works like this too. By spending time and energy, the little details come through. In MUDBIRD, I hand-coded a complete dynamic wind system that pushes plants, foliage, waves, and pinwheels according to the wind. The odds any one player will notice this are low, but I do believe that these small things make up for a certain feeling of quality within work. Besides, it is also very fun to make small and specific systems and details. You have to love the toil a little bit.

Looseness and friction are not my only interests when making art. I am often also driven by love, or heartbreak, or by simply a wanting to see something exist, for myself. I remember being very young and wanting to play certain video games and those specific video games not existing. It is lovely to have and learn the skills necessary to be able to make anything. This is the biggest reason why I am majoring in Industrial Design, at school. I would like to be able to make anything. I think I am also probably too ego-driven, and some part of me wants love or recognition or fame. But I am also driven by wanting to make the world a slightly better place or wanting to meet new people. While discussing her 2024 film Materialists at a Q&A I attended, the director Celine Song said, “people are my favorite drug”. I think about this often and I am very inspired by people, and people-adjacent things. People-adjacent things are LinkedIn and Zoom and Bar Mitzvah parties and Cheesecake Factory rewards cards. Certain things have extremely human qualities that I am also drawn to, perhaps this is another pillar of my practice.

Practice is also everchanging, and I hope (and know) that in six months, a year, or five, my values and beliefs around art and life will have shifted and reformed. My practice and work also extends beyond 2D or digital work, some of my work is conceptual as well, or action-based, like a project I was doing where I only went out to eat food rather than eating food at home for 20 days. One I want to do next is try as many porridges as possible out of all of the world’s grains. Food, relationships, events and routines are materials to create work out of. I think it’s worth it to place as little a restriction as possible on what ‘art’ can be, solely for the sake of living our lives with more intention. Maybe the only thing that cannot be art is a feeling, because we do not have specific controls over our feelings. Almost any action we can choose to make with intention has the power to be or to create art. Right now, art and living are twin suns spinning around one another. Life inspires the art we make and art inspires the lives we lead.

My time at Putty ends this Friday. I am sad knowing I will not be around fantastic creative people for the new future but happy knowing that I will be back with other fantastic creative people at school soon. I am going to miss the plethora of gadgets and niche technological objects and reference books available to me on a daily basis but I am deeply excited to have to make my own lunch again. I am excited for this next in-between and the new event-based projects I am working on and hosting at the end of the summer. Having a first office job has helped me realize my values and goals, I realize how much I value quick access to nature, oneness with my home, and a sense of place. I will certainly be at some office at another point in time, and I will likely have to balance a desire for freedom with the safety and financial ease an office brings. Even kind people who are smart and talented and ambitious easily end up at big tech companies without any kind of desire to do evil or satanic plot. There are many forces in the world that work very hard to discourage us from creating, making things for ourselves or others, and it is easy to lean back in the comfortable chair of private equities and corporations. I have a limited view on this because I am nineteen and have very few bills to pay and don’t really know anything about insurance, home ownership, or anything whatsoever to be honest. But I do not think youth should prevent one from being virtuous.

My practice is kind, virtuous, and ambitious. I like having big dreams and I love staying up late in the night working on something I believe in. It is helpful to be conscious of the main factors driving my work, and it can be illuminating to type out the common threads that exist in my brain between my art onto a computer. Artmaking is a driving factor behind my life, and I am excited to see what inspires and encourages me over my very long creative path. The windows are open and the crickets are roaring outside. The only light in the room is a red lamp and the computer rests on my lap as my legs stretch up on the wall. A soft rain climbs into the night and cools the air.