Embracing the Unexpected: Navigating Mistakes, Creativity, and Career Shifts in Art

How do you handle mistakes or “happy accidents” in your artwork? Do they lead to new ideas?

These days I would consider them all happy accidents for sure. A few years back though I’d have been singing a different tune.

I think a major reason why I can call them happy is due to a ton of maturity in my practice, as well as myself. I’ve grown a lot as a person over the last decade, mostly in the area of patience. When you couple that with the mindset that all things happen for a reason it gives you the permission to pause and engage with curiosity. If you can manage to keep yourself from attaching a ton of emotional energy to it, it’s very easy to detach and reflect on why that something may have occurred. Through the reflection process you can play the detective work with your imagination and reconstruct all the steps of how it happened and best of all you can then imagine how you could use that new discovery to your advantage!

This might help someone out, so I’ll go one step further... A practice I began a while back, anytime I am thinking of something I will try to imagine it’s polar opposite. For example, when I am designing new works, I am constantly flipping something around, inverting color palettes, or looking at something through a mirror... It is amazing what is revealed to you when you shift your perspective.

How do you balance the technical aspects of the work with the emotional or conceptual content? Is there a message to convey with your art?

Just recently, I have taken a more intentional approach to bridging the connection between my raw, intuitional feelings, and the technical expressions of emotion in relation to the concept or theme of a piece. I used to approach every piece intuitively and simply go with my gut feeling about how a composition should layout or coming up with a certain color palette. Now I am finding myself being much more intentional about the details of a piece and really bringing a whole new level of cohesion to a work.

For example, I am spending this entire year creating all of my works in Latin. It is very much an academic endeavor for me, meaning I am using it as a study of Latin itself. As well, I have been studying many of the saints of the early church that came of age in the Post-Roman West of the early Middle Ages. This was a time of great instability in the Mediterranean region that was juxtaposed by a tremendous spiritual enlightenment and the birth of early Christian church. Many of the themes of my pieces explore this tug of war between the extreme ends of both spectrums. The intensity of emotion needs to come through not only in the messaging but in the conflict of the compositions and color palettes as well.

I am so happy to have had the opportunity to expand on this question because I feel like people see my work and take in the visual nature of the work and of course they appreciate it for what it is. Yet, it is often lost on many the depth of meaning and significance behind the work.

Have you had to pivot in your career? What did it look like?

Oh yeah, many times but the most memorable of all being the transition from graffiti to contemporary art.

I say it was 2014 because that was really just the moment in time when I made the decision to do it. What it actually looked like was something else, that’s for sure. You have to understand that outside of my relationship with my now wife, my whole life revolved around graffiti. Multiple painting missions every week for years and years and years on end. How do you just bring that to a dead stop?!

In all the transition period in total lasted about 5 years. That period of time was a mix of a lot of artist experimentation and a whole lot of grieving. Everything at that time felt super frustrating and contentious. On the one hand I didn’t know how to do the thing I was envisioning doing. Life just doesn’t come with an instruction manual for doing something that you’re literally making up as you go. On the other hand, I’m settling into a new home with my wife and we’re expecting our first child. The frequency of my graffiti activities was dwindling down, and I wasn’t sure how to navigate any of it. It wasn’t just losing some light hobby; this was my entire identity and everything I had known for half of my life up that point. As well, I’ve got a new day job at a growing startup. Thinking back, it was just so much to handle, it was all very overwhelming for quite a while.

Things really shifted for me though as I moved into 2019. I had finally acquired an iPad the year before that really helped me lock into the process of how to layer the artwork I wanted to create. As well I had kicked off a project to turn my two-car garage into a studio. At the same time, the opportunity of a lifetime came to do some work in Cabo. By the end of that year, I was producing large canvas pieces out of the studio and I really felt like the things I had imagined doing were finally beginning to become a reality.

Now, I am a very ambitious man and there are still many things professionally as an artist I still feel like I haven’t accomplished yet. Looking back though, from 2019 on was when I really started to think to myself, this is it Jared, you really have become the thing you said you were going to become. That alone is such a major accomplishment and I’m just so dang proud of myself for persevering through it all.

I will never, NEVER give up on my dreams.