The first painting I ever completed was in the weeks after losing my father to cancer. It was a cathartic act — painting his death mask, an acrylic bust of his likeness with eyes shut and a black hole where the cancer had eaten away his throat. I didn't pick up a paintbrush again until years later, when I found myself on the other side of the world, living in a foreign country, once again faced with crisis.
In many ways, crisis was the catalyst that brought painting into my life, but it has never been the muse. For me, the rough patches I've experienced, along with the joys, are constant reminders of the impermanence of the world around me. The tweets, posts, emails, dings, and pixels that flood our day-to-day won't stand the test of time. They will vanish as quickly as they appeared, back into the digital ether, and be forgotten. As a web and software designer by trade, I know that the work I've produced over the past 20 years, and continue to produce, will likely suffer the same fate.
Hanging in my living room is a painting by my late grandfather, Don Whiston. It hung in my parents' living room throughout my childhood — a symbol of permanence, a bridge between generations that connected me to a grandfather I never met, and now connects my children to him and to my late parents. This is the promise and power of the art we produce. A few dollars' worth of paint and canvas becomes a time machine: a magical object that defies the laws of physics and thermodynamics, producing energy for years, decades, or millennia with no power source other than an artist's brushstroke.
I hope you enjoy my work. If you see it and feel something — anything at all — it will have served its purpose. :)
— Josh