Cause you're a sky full of stars 99 percent of this code is copy pasted
My name is Tyler & I give up. For now.
That was "about me" in April, & now I'm well enough to tell you more.
I was born in or near Astoria. I lived in a small apartment with my parents for a few years. I'd be introduced to my 2 cousins from my mother's side, who were my brother & sister. They were my closest friends & always wanted to find ways for them to come over as my parents moved me into Long Island. I'd grow older & begin to have play dates, but my cousins were always the ones I felt truly comfortable around. I was still a reasonably extroverted kid, but at some point, I began to develop strange habits that foreshadowed issues I still partially carry on to this day. One pattern was touching anybody who accidentally bumped into me, which turned into breathing my nose onto each palm of my hand evenly.
This was a turning point as my parents began to fight more aggressively. I started doubting my intelligence & usefulness, which affected my art. Because my environment grew more hostile in the late 2000s, I learned to entrance myself into my drawings to avoid it. Cartoons were my one hope to feel like the extraverted & lively kid I once was. I wanted to pick up where I left off & spark that next vague level of artistic skill I craved.
There are particular sensations from the first 10 years of my life that I still feel. It's one of great uncertainty & confidence. Having that adventurous impulse to explore because you can capture more weird feelings along the way. That's why I'm so pressed to make sure my art is loaded with specific & intense sensations (Ralph Bakshi is a great artist who does this in his 70s films like Heavy Traffic). This can count as an "artist statement", but because art ties so closely to my identity & how I suppressed my feelings, it is technically an "about me" statement, too.
I also lacked proper social skills. Beginning in the late 2000s, I grew more paranoid about how kids my age perceived me. I was the person who constantly spaced out. I would regularly frustrate people because I couldn't register their instructions: especially with my father; this leaned me to become introverted & refrain more from asking for help: be it a simple question or errand. I hated watching people become pissed off or weirded out because of my actions, so I'd develop ways to avoid social events & simple small talk. This was all before my teenage years, so these situations hurt me severely. To this day, I still lack proper social skills, space out regularly, frustrate people because of my cluelessness, avoid asking for help, & use my art to find that vague loving, extraverted identity I always sought.
When creating works like this, I had flow states, and I felt as if I'd reached back into that period when art felt so mysterious to me. My lost identity is here.
My childhood was permanently wounded by my mother's side of the family without ever knowing. I was the older brother who my Mom would express her struggles to. I was joyful when Mom got custody of me & my brother on the 1st day of school in 2011. My father & uncles drove away that morning in front of our house. I thought they wished only the worst for my Mom, & I felt like I had no other narrative to believe. I thought my Dad cheated on her, committed despicable crimes, & believed, like Mom, he would "go to hell."
My Mom's sisters, though, would constantly be forgiven and avoided like clockwork. Dad knew about this decades-long habit & even tried moving us away from them into the suburbs. She still couldn't admit to the toxicity & kept inviting them over & we traveled with them regularly. I still feel like I love them, & it's quietly painful to see their real intentions, which were to hurt & scam us for their own benefit. My Mom's sisters ruined a part of our lives.
I had more fondness of my mother’s side than vice verca as a child. They presented themselves as the more “fun” & “liberating” group. They were loud & risk-taking whenever we went out. My father knew her family was full of scam artists & drug dealers, so along with moving to New Hyde Park, he tried to pull me & my brother away by routinely driving us to our grandmother's house back in Astoria. My Dad's family was stricter, & at that time, equated to less love being spread around. I never knew of the lengths they endured to take me away from the toxicity my mom's side was creating. After 2-3 years of court trials & weekend visits, in 2013, my Dad got custody of me & my brother. I was devestated. Mom, for YEARS, made me believe Dad was the bad guy, & the dream she spoke of, about "finally getting her big check so she can get me as many iPads as I wanted" in a fancy British accent, was gone. We shortly arrived to Ma's (my grandmother's) apartment that same night & stress ate in tears.
I made them proud by voicing this story so cryptically, but on a positive note, I can leave it at this: my family & I need to live in silence, love & fun because silence is loud, love is grueling, & fun is boring.
Art records energy. Sensations attempt to prove the heat of dreamlessness. Here the dream's ambition will frustrate the art, so as a compromise, layers formulate to understand it. As such, drawing is the prompt allowing your unconsciousness to give back: & within it lies a new impossible medium that leaves the gaps vague. It sits in the conscious & unconscious because it has to experiment on schedule to birth the flow state.
My work intends not to understand its identity in a dream sense. Instead, it explores the emotional, layered impressions formed in each gaze of the eye. It's a snapshot within an infinite amount of visual sounds that no brain can't harvest. The drawing's history of each zap of movement dances speculators into small holes of visible words. For this, the art is not solely mine & never will be, & will die when it's efficient; only when spontaneity forms the structure is when it is by a technicality: & that alone isn't efficient.
The beat in my brain that questions no matter who I become is the movement of a cartoon. The lies of life's horror are sweetened at face-value to give me an intellectual invitation. The language of memories rests in one frame & breaks out of my control after every subtle command in nature. These cartoons that don't know it's own space yet controls it in my eyes, dreams I don't understand, can be brought closer via those accidental movements. No matter the level of purpose, any illusion of evolved space enhances most from the heat in real life. Let warmth, at the best of death, contrive cartoonish breezes so broken vessels can heal. Energy can now bake ever so softly when excitement breathes within its blind spots.