One of my favorite things about painting is that I hardly have any formal training. That means I don’t know whether I’m getting something wrong or not. If I hate something I paint, I don’t have to show anyone. And there’s no pressure to meet anyone’s expectations. I really try to bring this attitude into the rest of my work.
I think having tons of training in an art form is an amazing thing. I’m really proud of my Master’s in Acting. And I’m really proud of how much time I spent learning music when I was young. But when you learn something with teachers all around you, there are things that can get stuck in your head, things that follow you. Guidelines you grow out of and rules taught to you that don’t fit who you are. I love all of the technical things I have deeply learned because I love to learn. But painting is a free place for me. Nobody is expecting anything from me and I have no idea what I’m doing. It is entirely my own rules.
Painting also teaches me how to go back to my other art forms and let go. That feeling of jumping off a ledge and seeing how it goes. It’s just art. The ledge is not even real. It just means risking making mistakes, looking stupid, being vulnerable, fucking up loudly. That’s all it means. It is actually this feeling of safety and danger at the same time—that’s what performance is for me. And that balance of safety and danger is my favorite thing as a performer. But I’m really happy that I have painting—-a place where I feel only safe.
One night I was workshopping a Hamlet soliloquy in New York with a bunch of other actors and directors. A few people would put up what they were working on and the room would give feedback. Afterward, as everyone was walking to the bar, an older fellow told me that I shouldn’t go to drama school. He said that I already know everything I need to know, that drama school would just put rules on me and get me in my head. And that I did awesome Hamlet that night. It meant a lot to me. But I was like “I really like to learn.” And it’s true. I really love the technical stuff. I loved having that conservatory sealed off safe space to really become obsessed with little details. But I’ve also spent years shedding some of the things I’ve learned that stuck to me that aren’t working for me. I wonder what that guy saw, whatever raw thing he saw that he felt he needed to tell me about.
I remember that time, though. Before I auditioned for my Master’s program. I was in a play at the time and it was extremely emotionally unsustainable for me. I had no idea how to recover from the darkly comedic, physically taxing, getting raped as my character every night, choking a guy to death, singing, never leaving the stage performance I was doing in a black box theatre. I was raw and cracked open and the only way I knew how to do things was to punch myself in a wound, somewhat randomly, really abstractly, and reach into a space that had weird energy. My personal life and health suffered for it. I felt brittle all the time. I think that’s why I chose to go to drama school. How do I do this safely? How do I recover? Can I keep doing this? I love doing this but should I be doing this? Is there a way for me to do it? And, yes, I found that way. I used what I learned and built that way.
I think one of the best things I ever did was learn Butoh a few years ago. It was only a few months before the pandemic where I was taking classes and building a personal practice of Butoh. But it restored me, restored my nervous system in really profound ways and it has healed me. it’s like my painting but full-body. Painting and Butoh, those are the two places where I feel the most free.
Today I’ve been learning three scenes for a callback. I’m excited. It’s a play I like. And I’m trying to make sure I spend as much time in an abstract, restorative place as I can. And keep myself in that space for the audition. The adrenaline and the lines will give the stakes, they always do. I don’t really need to hype anything up. I just need to spend a lot of my time unwinding, it’s part of the process. All of my work has this build and release of winding up and winding down, etc. And I’m planning to paint a lot more and bring my Butoh practice into my life because both of those things are gifts to me as a performer. They just free something up. They make me a better singer, too. It’s so hard to learn enough about something to the level where you could be a teacher but then turn off that analytical, scholastically hungry part part of your mind in order to just do. But I’m getting better. It’s the line we’re all walking all the time. Meditation helps. Painting helps. Butoh helps.
Anyway those are my paintings there.