Well, here I am several months after starting the aforementioned Patreon, and I haven’t accomplished much in the way of visual art at all. As is typical of me, I overextended myself and ambitiously envisioned the Patreon as both somehow encompassing both my work as a circus artist and as a visual artist. After quitting my part-time desk job, I naively anticipated a well-deserved labor utopia of mornings focused on visual art and the rest of the day devoted to circus training, coaching, and performing.

Well, well, welll…the Patreon is here.

I’m writing this post literally just to put this image online, so I can embed it in my Patreon website because Google Photos refuses to let me embed the images I have uploaded…but hello there, I’m about to have a Patreon!

Bodies. So taboo, and we are so brainwashed when it comes to what we think a “male” body is supposed to look like, what a “female” body is supposed to look like.

Well, here we are. The year 2020. Stuck in quarantine with everywhere to be and nowhere to go. 2019 blew by in a blink of an eye. I didn’t do much painting, focusing more intensively on circus arts. Here is one of the paintings I did, called “The Reckoning”:

Whoops. A whole ‘nother year just went by. I know it looks like I haven’t been painting, but I have, I swear. It’s just that it’s way easier to update Instagram and this website was half-broken until now. Also, I’m still a circus artist. 

Dear me, it has been over a year since I last posted, hasn’t it! Well, I guess that’s to be expected since I was working abroad 5 months out of this past year, and trapeze is still my first and foremost focus. Pop over to www.swiftcircus.com to see what I’ve been up to.

That said, 2017 was not entirely without painting. I have been focusing on small works and have done quite a few pieces as gifts, which has been very satisfying. 

When I began this piece, it was about loneliness and liminality (from the Latin word līmen, meaning “a threshold”)—about feeling alone and neither here nor there—hence my choice of a door, which is literally a threshold, and the brooding head of a raven. 

I am the raven queen, this foul head a heavy thing. Everyday I wait for a sign of the one with wings as black as mine.