Butterfly in a Meat Grinder

Butterfly in a Meat Grinder
Digital collage, Krita
2026

Introduction

I graduated from community college with my Associate’s in Art in 2020. I went back five years later, which was as long as I’d been on hiatus from making art.

My post-graduation burnout coincided with the COVID-19 lockdowns. As the world came to a screeching halt I fell into an apathetic backslide, more than happy to forget about my academic future and schlub around for weeks (then months) on end.

By the time quarantine lifted for good my mental health was improved. I devoted time to hobbies again, both old and new. I mostly focused on writing and tech, which lead to my first exploration of Linux, blogging, etc.¹

The unfamiliar software, hardware, and digital workflow let me experiment different methods of making art without being reminded of my formal college output. Flash forward a couple years and I found myself retreading the same ground I had in school, defaulting back to abstract figurative compositions; some artistic instincts follow wherever you go, regardless of mode, medium, or materials.

By 2025 I finally felt ready to jump back into traditional art, and returned to community college in the fall—not as a student, but an independent artist.

I enrolled in the studio practicum program, which facilitates an independent study without any standardized curriculum—meaning that I can create whatever work I want without any overhead, and still take advantage of the amazing facilities and faculty my school has to offer.

Returning to an academic environment has me reflecting on my attitude around art and art school. When I first sat down and spent time with these feelings I was surprised to find how deep they went. This blog post acts as a space to process my thoughts and feelings.

I hope that it will be of merit to others, too, whether that be disillusioned artists, creatives trying to regain their passion, or adults like me who, through one blunder or another, might have “lost” their potential. Potential which, once promising, only resulted in missed chances and sticky regrets.

Prologue

(Click images to open in full-view.)

A picture of me from around the time I started art school.

My usual setup in my mom's garage.

Back when time was measured in ashtrays filled and paint tubes emptied.

I couldn't finish a painting or drawing without at least one cigarette break.

I mainly stuck to non-objective stuff before college; I fell in love with Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism in high school.

More garage era work.

A larger example of my Neo-Expressionist inspirations (mostly Haring and Basquiat).

One of my first drawing classes.

My space at the painting studio on campus where I worked.

I did a lot of self-portraits. Each portrait was an attempt to uncover some part of myself I couldn't yet manifest externally.

My usual "uniform" at the on-campus painting studio where I worked, with one of the resident artists' dogs, Gracie.

My figurative studies became more investigative and dynamic as I developed my own style.

I broke away from my ultra-flat, heavy-handed graphic style, trying to find new ways of injecting dynamism into my figures.

Another figure study from The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists by Erik A. Ruby.

A sketch of a mannequin from my first figure drawing class.

My first try at gouache paint.

The second of my penultimate works, which shows more of my Abstract Expressionist roots.

One of my first figurative collages; I did a small series during my 2019 independent studies.

An early in-progress photo of my preliminary sketch for Arch.

A picture of myself toward the end of my initial term, decidedly less dead inside.

One of my Jungian-esque drawings; 2020.

A sketch from my transition into digital art; made in GIMP, 2021.

Screenshot from my first foray into using Krita (which coincided with my Nan Goldin phase).

An early digital abstract sketch; 2021.

A tentative return to my automatic figure compositions.

An unfinished painting of my partner, Jem, with my cat Marley; 2023.

A self-portrait; 2024.

A more experimental figure; 2024.

My first run with Krita's RBGA oil brushes; 2024.

My Krita config as of April 2026.

One of my first live sketches after returning to school.

My first attempt at a figurative collage, mid-process; 2025.

Another live figure sketch; 2025.

All of the collages I started in my first semester back at art school.

My first complete figurative collage; 2025. (It was also the first piece that I ever sold in a gallery.)

Sussing out the spatial relationships between my figures when they're displayed on a wall.

One of my newest figures (and the accompanying concept sketch).

The previous figure, freestanding.

Another WIP, near completion.

A picture from the day I embarked on my latest body of work.

A selfie from 2026, for comparison's sake. (Taken while finishing this post!)

A therapist once told me that in order to become a butterfly, caterpillars turn into goop.

First they entomb themselves in a chrysalis of their own making. Then they liquefy into a primordial ooze, rearranging their DNA to achieve their final form as a butterfly.

Modeled after a blueprint inked through evolution, the butterfly’s composite parts—wings, antennae, etc—are stowed away in packets of genetic code called “imaginal discs”. During metamorphosis, these discs inside of the caterpillar are unlocked and their contents sequenced into the transformative process.

Metamorphosis underway.

Metamorphosis is a romantic, mystifying feat of nature. At first glance the product seems entirely separate from the original iteration, but has in fact been sitting dormant since its inception.

There isn’t really a before and after with butterflies, so much as an “inside” versus “outside”—dependent upon which characteristics are externally dominant. These “butterfly variables” manifest through subconscious forces outside of the caterpillar’s limited understanding, propelled by an instinct to grow and change.

When I think back on my time at art school, I am often reminded of this metaphor. College was my chrysalis. I entered as some little scared caterpillar a few degrees shy of a mental breakdown, teetering on the edge between self-actualization and self-destruction.

I swaddled myself in a cocoon of flannel, cigarette smoke, and acrylic paint, and dissolved into goop. From there, I discovered parts of myself that I never knew existed. They first manifested on paper and canvas—like a blueprint that I slowly internalized, then embodied externally. Much like a work of art or a caterpillar undergoing metamorphosis, I didn’t know what the end result would be.

In Chrysalis

I enrolled in community college in the fall of 2017. I was nineteen years old. The move hadn’t been entirely consensual, but rather foisted upon me by my concerned mother and ex-step mom.²³

I took a gap year after high school, which I squandered chainsmoking, partying, getting high, and painting in my mom’s garage; I also I started testosterone—a goal that saw me through the worst of my high school depression—but stopped after only three months.

As much as I knew HRT was right for me, I wasn’t ready to come out to the rest of my family, let alone the world at large. This aborted transition left me in a suspended pupal state. I had a high-pitched voice that cracked when I laughed, and fuzz on my upper lip I inspected every morning in the bathroom mirror.

I spent every day in a dissociative haze, trying to numb the pain from my gender dysphoria with every available means besides the only real solution. These half-measures quickly lost their effectiveness. As my friends all peeled off to go to college, start new careers, or (allegedly) sell acid in California, I remained at home, increasingly alone and unable to achieve drug-induced apathy.

Without friends to smoke with, weed lost its appeal. I soon discovered that the only thing more depressing than smoking alone was drinking alone, which I gave up after a few failed attempts. Eventually I realized that I didn’t like drinking or getting high that much after all—I just liked having friends. Getting fucked up is something to bond over at nineteen, but rapidly becomes unsustainable long-term, and solo inebriation was never my thing. This left art (and Marlboro Red cigarettes) as my only solace.

Smoking a cig in 2017.

My first drawing class in 2018.

I signed up for an art class immediately upon enrolling. By my second semester I abandoned any pretense of academic foresight,⁴ ditched my gen-eds, and jumped headfirst into the art program.

I didn’t sign up for classes thinking, “I’m going to get an art degree.” I didn’t have any goals for my studies. Transferring to complete a bachelor’s degree was but a far-off hypothetical.

I didn’t care about what I’d do after, because there was no after. There was only now; and preceding that, a before I constantly tried to outpace: old emotional wounds held open by loneliness and inescapable gender dysphoria, medicated with substances that were slowly losing their effectiveness.

My friendships were petering out, my transition on indefinite hold, and I was plagued by intense bouts of depression and anxiety. I needed to express myself and have that be validated. It felt like if I didn’t, I’d literally go insane.

This drive to express myself through art was born from a lack of identity. Stuck between post-adolescence and adulthood, female and male, my old friend group and total isolation, I had no self-concept to speak of.

Without a solid identity I couldn’t be authentic in who I was; without authenticity, I couldn’t connect with people; without connection, I became isolated, and turned inward.

It’s hard to describe major depression in words. Doubly so for gender dysphoria. Some days it felt as incidental as wearing the wrong pair of shoes. Other times it felt like I was trapped in my own body, paraded around by some doppelganger who had overtaken my limbs as I watched from within. When people said my name—my old name⁵—they weren’t referring to me, but the symbiotic avatar that kept me locked inside my internal prison.

One of the most valuable things art school gave me was a chance to be myself—my real self. I went by Xavier and used he/him pronouns on campus; at home, I remained in the closet.

I’m lucky to live stealth⁶ now. Back when I was pre-T⁷ I had no choice but to be “visibly trans”. People struggled to determine whether I was a young boy, butch lesbian, or some weird flavor of tranny. One day while waiting at the bus station, some cracked-out guy shambled up and started yelling at me, asking if I was a boy or a girl.

Trying to live as your true gender pre-transition is terrifying, humiliating, and unbelievably courageous. Looking back, I often wonder how I managed it—especially now that I’ve passed as a cis man for years. The answer, of course, is because I had to.

The most charitable thing you can do for a trans person is to affirm who they are, even if it’s in direct contradiction with the whole world telling them what they’re not. Given that I hadn’t continued taking testosterone, I lacked the physical changes that would’ve “proven” my identity as a man. All I had at my disposal was the ability to share my truth—and the grace of others to validate it for me.

My classmates and professors all respected my name and pronouns. As a pre-HRT trans person I was at the mercy of their compassion, and I can’t describe just how thankful I am that I found a supportive environment during such a fragile time of my life. I have no idea how long it would have otherwise taken me to find the courage to come out to my family and begin my transition in full.

A one-off piece I started after I got harassed at the bus station for being visibly trans.

The art I produced during this period was especially raw and vulnerable. It felt less like creation and more like excavation. Each sketch, drawing, and painting was an externalized part of myself that would’ve otherwise remained trapped inside of me.

Without the company of friends, the comfort of drugs, or the ability to be my authentic self, art was my only means of genuine self-expression. Like messages in a bottle thrown out to sea, my mind swarmed with desperate communications from my inner self, which I decoded visually on paper and canvas.

Some of these translations were obvious, rendered in self-portraits literal to the point of being cliche. Mostly accurate to my gender-ambiguous reality, I would always exaggerate certain masculine features such as the peach fuzz on my upper lip, or the square shadows beneath my brow-bone.⁸

Other interpretations were less self-referential, featuring nude figures arranged in accordance with abstract space. Some were drawn in dozens of rushed sequences; others, I labored over like terminally-recursive math equations.

These works sprang from my subconscious like prehistoric motifs painted on dark cave walls. I was fumbling toward some deeper meaning that was clear to nobody, least of all to me.

A self-portrait from 2019.

I created a "figurative geometry", which I implemented to construct compositions.

The Meat

Upon realizing my instinct toward human figures, I concentrated my academic attention on figure drawing. I had always enjoyed self-portraiture, and non-objective abstraction was my first “serious” mode of painting,⁹ but something about figure drawing incited my creativity like nothing else.

This move wasn’t entirely without precedent. Shortly after high school graduation, I enjoyed a brief internship at a local art center where I “borrowed”¹⁰ two figure reference books:

• The Figure in Motion: A Visual Reference for Artists by Mark Smith
• The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists by Erik A. Ruby

I never sat down and studied the human anatomy in depth; admittedly, I still haven’t. When it comes to art, I learn more through experience than analysis. I don’t know what the different bone structures or muscles are called—but I do know what they look like.

I spent hours at a time sketching references. I started with chalk pastels, unable to relinquish my use of color as value (which I implemented previously in my non-objective work). Chalk pastels provide vibrant pigments whilst enabling quick sketches, although they are less mutable than charcoal. As my practice grew more studious, I eventually switched to ink.¹¹

Chalk pastel figure study referenced from The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists (2017)

Sketch of a live model from my Figure Drawing II independent study; drawn from above on a ladder (2019).

I was already familiar with the human figure as a subject of study when I arrived at community college. But I didn’t want to specialize in the human figure conceptually until attending my first real figure drawing class.

I learned of several amazing figurative artists—too many to list here¹²—and discovered the exciting subtextual possibilities of the human body, as illustrated in countless fruitful dichotomies.¹³

I fell in love with the methodologies behind figure drawing. The human figure is one macro composition made up of a million micro compositions within. You can abstract it to geometric extremes, or render planar shifts with hyper-realistic attention to detail. The human body is a visual language universal to the entire human race, no matter the stylistic dialect—in other words, it is immediately recognizable to your subconscious, even if your conscious mind is unsure.

Here—within the jigsaw planes of juxtaposed human figures—my work coalesced into a synthesis of inspirations from both past and present:

• my non-objective background manifested in how I flattened space and manipulated the figure-ground relationship with geometric patterns and rhythms
• my abstract evolution during the interim between high school and college lead to a heavy-handed approach, vibrant in color and bold in mark
• my figurative studies provided the object of my work—the human body—onto which I projected my inner thoughts and feelings; eventually I did without references and drew automatic figures from memory and imagination, which opened me up to more stylistic renderings unfettered by literal reality

Such was the meat of my creative work—at least materially.

At most, my figures were cryptographic avatars rendered by an amateur hand; I had a post-adolescent love affair with Jungian psychology, and considered each male/female pair an archetypal dichotomy representing my bifurcated gender experience. Using this dichotomy to personify my conscious and subconscious, I sought to illustrate different aspects of the psyche through an interplay of male/female, masculine/feminine, submissive/dominant, etc—blah, blah, blah.¹⁴

To make a long exposition short, my work was the culmination of myself as a person and an artist. It was my escape from daily life and a window into my true self. It represented everything I was, and everything that I wasn’t.

In the summer of 2019 I took Figure Drawing 2 (basically a figurative independent study) and produced two drawings, which I consider to be the penultimate works of my college output.

The first piece (see below) is a drawing of four figures arranged in a quasi-symmetrical composition, with non-objective elements underneath. The second piece (see below, right) is an upside-down drawing of a seated male figure from the torso up, curled in a somber posture. Both were drawn with charcoal, graphite, oil pastel, and modeling paste on wood panels.

Arch
Mixed media on wood panel
2019

I began by creating several sketches using a system of geometry I had developed while churning out automatic figures, wherein I created larger compositions composed of the figures themselves. Utilizing different postures, positions, and perspectives, I constructed geometric superstructures, with different figures emphasizing different aspects of shape and line.¹⁵

It’s easy for me to track the development of my work in hindsight; at the time, I was totally aimless, fielding random experiments and writing proofs with artistic instinct only deciphered recursively.

One of my favorite Buddhist teachers, Robina Courtin, often quotes a psychologist friend of hers, who equated self-exploration with “putting your hands in your own shit”. Whether conducted as a spiritual or artistic endeavor—(and really, what’s the difference?)—I find this to be an apt analogy for undergoing the huge mental shift that accompanied my creative one.

Art is but a record of how we perceive reality. Whether that reality is a bowl of fruit, the human body, or non-representational colors, its rendering hinges on our own sensibilities. The context of this perception determines the artistic process and its subject—in this case, myself. Each study and sketch, drawing or painting, brought me one step closer to the root of my own mind, and the true self that awaited me there, if only I could finally reach him.

The Meat Grinder

Should this work constitute as the meat of my creative output, art school would be the meat grinder.¹⁶

I don’t mean art school as in the mentorship I received from my professors, the advances I made in my personal work, nor the curriculum I studied, but the “art school” as told in myth and cliche: sleepless nights, grueling critiques, competitive exhibitions, gallery awards, chainsmoked cigarettes, and studios in disarray—all of which compromised my time college, too.

Remember the context of my enrollment. Art school was a mental and emotional sabbatical first, and an academic endeavor second. Awards and accolades on the material of my work were affirmations of its immaterial inspirations; critiques and losses turned into personal indictments. I remember the rush I got when receiving awards—and the crash that came when I lost them.¹⁷

I entered art school under the pretense of study but operated in the transformative, wrestling with my inner self like a caterpillar writhing in its cocoon. That isn’t to say that creative academia and self-exploration are mutually exclusive, or that in order to achieve the former you must sacrifice the latter (and vice versa).

But any student is a prospective professional, and one must learn healthy boundaries between yourself and your work. Neither am I refuting the valuable skills I learned or the work I put into improving my craft. It’s just that wasn’t my primary focus or motivation.

As soon as I had to study anything outside of figurative or abstract art, my brain turned off and my grades suffered for it. I wasn’t interested in learning artistic disciplines outside of my own—I just wanted to dig deeper into my work, unsatisfied until I hit bedrock.

So I rooted around all the muck in my head and transmuted it into visual concepts, which I then tacked up on the wall, like a visualized lobotomy presented to a jury of my peers during critiques: my brain shrink-wrapped in Styrofoam, put on display like a fresh cut of meat at the grocery store; just forget the carcass of my ego strung up on meat hooks in the back.

Now What?

The whole point of community college is that you receive a preliminary education with the intention of transferring to a second institution, where you’ll finish out a big fat bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, or even a PhD. It’s a stepping stone—a transition—a precursor to the rest of academia, which is itself an entry point to the world of professional adults.

Or at least, that’s what I thought it was at the time.

Regardless of how accurate my interpretation was, the truth is that I never wanted any part of it. I just wanted to make art and be around other artists and learn from experienced mentors. While my peers discussed continuing their studies in art education, art history, or graphic design, I secretly wished that I could just stay in place forever, always learning, creating, and collaborating without any overhead or obligations.

It never occurred to me that this was a viable option. The question of what I’d do for the rest of my life felt like a zero-sum game: all or nothing, pass or fail, make it or break it.

As my time at community college wound down to a close, I became nervous and flighty. I stopped making art for myself. It didn’t matter what I wanted to make; it only mattered what other people wanted to see. Just like that, my one emotional outlet had twisted into yet another trap of other people’s expectations.

Most of my college output, compiled for a solo gallery show.

My poor dad—who helped finance what amounted to me pissing away hundreds of dollars in acrylic paint¹⁸—sat me down one day leading up to graduation and asked what I intended on doing now.

I had no fucking idea. I told him I’d transfer to a state university because it felt like the right answer, not because I actually planned to follow through. He then asked me what I’d major in and stuff like that—not maliciously, just with the skeptic caution befitting a blue-collar father to a weird art kid who spent too much time with their head in the clouds.

The more he pressed, the more I realized what graduation actually entailed: it wasn’t just as simple as switching to a new school, but required me to decide on what direction I wanted my life to take, and how I’d get there.

COVID-19, thankfully, bailed me out.

My final semester began in 2020. Vague rumors of some Chinese flu were already spreading during the preceding winter break. They solidified into threats of quarantine that were finally realized in March with lockdowns everyone assumed to be temporary. This was not the case.

In the end, I left for spring break and never came back. My courses were finished over Zoom and I got my diploma in the mail without fanfare, along with my final meager paycheck.¹⁹

It didn’t feel like much of an accomplishment. As a death toll in the hundreds of thousands ticked upward on daily newscasts, I rescinded back into myself, stuck at home with no friends, no school, no job, and no goals. For lack of any other ideas, I transferred to the same state university as my peers, the one I had told my father about. I signed up as a Studio Arts major, met with an academic advisor, and even went on an in-person campus tour.²⁰ Each step in the process felt more dreadful than the last.

I knew I had great potential. My work was good, my vision unique; in an alternate universe, I probably would’ve found great success as a professional artist. But I was unorganized and directionless in my academics: I eschewed forethought, attention to detail, craftsmanship, and careful planning. I only wanted to make art on my terms, not anybody else’s—and least of all on somebody else’s dime.

Somewhere along the way, my motivation around art making had changed. It wasn’t for myself anymore, but for other people—or my idea of what other people wanted. What would sell? What would get me into a BFA program? What would look best on a gallery wall? What would stand out in a classroom full of other young, gifted art students?

I went to one of my favorite professors for advice, whom I considered a mentor not only in art but in life. We spoke on the phone one afternoon; I remember sitting on the steps of my mom’s front porch, looking out at the same neighborhood I’d grown up in, where but a few years previous I had thrown massive parties and enjoyed the best friendships I’d ever known. Now I was all alone, staring down the barrel of the rest of my life while the world collapsed around me.

It goes without saying that nothing was going to plan for me. I suppose that is made difficult when you never had a plan to speak of. I missed my classmates and my teachers and the art department’s dark brick walls. I missed the buttery smooth surface of a fresh piece of paper, and the adrenaline that comes with making the first mark. Most of all, I missed the security and confidence that art brought me. Now all I felt was the insurmountable threat of my own inadequacy, and a loss of purpose and passion.

I lamented the loss of my creative momentum to my professor, who told me something that I’ll never forget.

“I think art is were you feel safe—I don’t know if you can make a career of it.”

She wasn’t being mean, just honest. And as soon as she said it, I knew that she was right.

As part of the university application process, I submitted a portfolio of what I considered to be my best work: the culmination of three years of intense study, wherein I combined my love of non-objective painting with my academic concentration in figure drawing.

A select few applicants were awarded grants based on the merit of their portfolios. I didn’t win anything—but a friend of mine had texted me saying that he had.

The news sent me into an existential panic attack. My art wasn’t good enough. I wasn’t good enough. All my worst fears had come true.

I spent the evening crying to myself. The next morning I rescinded my enrollment and quit making art altogether.

Learning to Fly

My argument isn’t that art school sucks or that everyone regrets it. But it requires boundaries that I never managed to build and aspirations that I never held. It just wasn’t the path for me.

Separating this realization from all that I had learned and enjoyed at community college was too difficult to bear, so I stepped away from art entirely.

No matter how you dice it, it all comes down to the same thing: at some point, you’ve got to decide whether you want to have art in your life, or put your life into art.

I wasn’t cut out to put my whole life into art. I knew it’d buckle with the slightest bit of pressure. Art was my escape—I couldn’t force it past its bounds of sentimentality, because then I’d have nowhere else to turn. The idea of making art into my livelihood made me want to stop making anything at all—and I did, for about five years.²¹

This isn’t to say my time in art school wasn’t worthwhile. I got a lot of out of it. But instead of putting that toward furthering my education or obtaining a career, I used it to find who I really was. Which is a valid enough goal on its own. I just wasn’t aware it was my goal until I forced myself onto a trajectory that I’d never aimed for in the first place.

All told, I spent three years in a pressure cooker of artistic introspection, gently guided by the tutelage of my professors. Inspired by the legacies of different artists and art movements, I found my voice—both artistically and literally. I discovered the value in my own ideas and the courage to express them with confidence. I made friends. I made art. I made decisions. I made myself. One awkward, fearful, bumbling step at a time.

I left a completely different person—more confident, more self-aware, more engaged—and all the more vulnerable for it. I came out to my family as trans, underwent HRT, got a new job, and moved out on my own.

But metamorphosis isn’t free. I was totally transformed—at the cost of all it took to get me there. Stuck half-emerged from my cocoon, dripping in the soupy remains of my previous self, unsure how to mechanize my new wings.

For the longest time I couldn’t approach art without being reminded of everything I’d gone through and all my “unspent” potential. I didn’t know what worth my experiences were now that I wasn’t going to “do anything” with them. Much like how I had to determine who I was without the trappings of my false past self, I needed to learn how to make art without relying on academic achievements and others’ approval.

I started small. Attempts with pen and paper were disastrous, the familiar medium triggering too much anxiety. Around this time I was getting more into tech and Linux, so I decided to jump back into digital art; I’d flirted with it previously, but only as a young teenager taking cues from artists on DeviantART and Tumblr.

A decade older and informed by years of both academic training and self-study, I was much more successful. I had used GIMP before so I started there,²² but eventually switched to Krita, which I’ve continued to use exclusively to the present day. It’s a robust program and insanely modular. Tweaking with configurations in the software and fiddling with different hardware took the pressure off of the creative aspect, allowing me to fully relax by the time it came to actually draw something.

It was like a flip switched. I’d found my freedom again. The digital medium felt new and exciting, wholly disconnected from anything else I’d done before. There was no prior knowledge from which I pulled. Working alone in my bedroom well past midnight, I had no peers to compare myself to.

One of my earliest digital figure sketches; done in GIMP, before I switched to Krita.

When I finished community college I wasn’t motivated to create anything. I was tired and burnt out. It felt like I had nothing left to give. Everything surrounding art had become a transaction: money for school; school for skills; skills to make something; make something to be something.

But I already was something. More than that, I was somebody—Xavier: a truth that continued to solidify day by day, month by month, and then year by year, as my transition continued.

I’d done enough making of myself. But, as I slowly began drawing again, I realized: I could still make something for myself—like I had way back when I chainsmoked Marlboros in my mom’s garage. Except I wasn’t stuck in the margins of a sketchbook page anymore, cloistered in the proverbial closet while bingeing pot, cigarettes, and Miller Lite.

Without relying on art to provide a sense of self, my newfound sense of self could provide my art. Anything I made now would be part of a larger whole. No more fragmented half-truths. Instead, it’d be a celebration.

My first self-portrait in Krita; 2021.

A more recent self-portrait; 2025.

Using this philosophy as a baseline, I continued re-familiarizing myself with the habit of drawing and painting—a painful process that often ended in frustration as I worked through deeply-held prejudices against myself and my work.

But I had all the time in the world. No admissions board to impress, gallery shows to win, or final projects to submit. I stopped and started as I pleased, whether that meant drawing once a month or working on the same painting for two weeks straight.

It felt like trying to walk again after being paralyzed from the waist down—regular tasks suddenly all-encompassing when learned anew. No matter how arduous the process, I kept at it; if I let myself slack, the harder it’d be to regain my skills in the future.

Eventually I hit my stride. I experimented more, breaking away from my standard self-portraits and figures drawn from reference. I also started taking advantage of Krita’s custom brush packs, textures, and plugins, which opened up a whole new world of experimentation and discovery.

To this end, I accredit digital art for helping me draw and paint again. The new format enabled me to take chances and approach my work with a fresh mind. This process of relearning ended with a digital painting commission I did for my coworker—the first one I’d ever successfully finished.²³

If you had asked me five years prior whether I’d be drawing and painting again—let alone taking a huge commission—I wouldn’t have believed you. But I’d done it. My hiatus was over; I’d been an artist still, but for the first time in ages I felt like one, too.

Opie
Digital, Krita
2024

After Before and After

Comfortable in my new digital workflow, I kept coming back to the same abstract-figurative explorations I’d started in college. But the process couldn’t be mapped 1:1 to my digital setup. In order to achieve the work I wanted, I’d need to return to the nexus of its creation: pen, paper, and the basement of my local community college.

The idea had been floating in my mind for months, but it was only after gentle insistence from my partner, Jem, that I decided to re-enroll at my previous school—not as a student, but an independent artist in the studio practicum program with a concentration in figure drawing.

My first day was entirely deja vu. My mind was spliced with memories from years prior, generating a mental before-and-after side-by-side everywhere I went.

There’s a bridge that connects the parking lot to the main building on campus. Circa 2017, it was a meager strip of cement with safety railings; now it’s an open-air skywalk, its vaulted roof held up by steel crossbeams with LED lights at each juncture.

Eight years ago I walked across on my way to Intro to 2D Design, my yellow Jansport backpack from high school stuffed with brand-new art supplies, a pack of cigarettes, marijuana, and a city bus pass.²⁴ I was still pre-T, wearing a hand-bleached denim jacket and tattered Vans, my sparse mustache morphing my feminine facial features into something resembling the truth hidden beneath them. Fearfully fearless—like an animal desperate to be free of its cage but still wary of the outside world—I corrected my professors at each roll call when they used my deadname: “I go by Xavier,” I’d say, injecting as much confident nonchalance into my voice as I could while the nape of my neck beaded with sweat.

In 2025, I walked across the bridge nearly a decade older, my face defined by a square jaw and scruffy goatee—wearing a modest white t-shirt and brown shorts,²⁵ my car keys jangling off my hip from a carabiner hooked onto my belt loop, the same backpack I’d taken across the Atlantic to visit Jem in England slung over my shoulders.²⁶ In my wallet, my driver’s license read: XAVIER; SEX: M.

The moment I walked through the school doors I was arrested by a strange anxiety—the inverse of that which I’d felt years before. I no longer doubted myself; but this time, I doubted whether I should be here.

My stomach twisting, I squared my shoulders and tromped downstairs, where white-washed walls gave way to warm brick and footprints of ceramic dust patterned the floor. Proceeding deeper into the art department, I passed the single-stall restroom I once (or twice) cried in, then the door I would slip out of to go smoke cigarettes beneath the building, and finally the old figure drawing classroom.

I stepped past the threshold to be met with a cheery welcome from my old professor—the same professor I’d spoken with on the phone five years prior. The drawing classroom had been updated since I’d been gone, but its eggshell-white walls remained the same; as did the semi-circle of art horses arrayed around the platform for models.

Figure Drawing I students filed in as I set up my things, set off from the rest of the students. Class commenced. As my professor began elucidating the different points of anatomy in the human body, I studied them with my eyes, scribbling quick gesture sketches to try and reinstate my hand-eye coordination.

The trick with live figure drawing is that you need to spend 90% of your time looking and only 10% of your time drawing. Look well enough and you’ll be able to draw anyone in front of you. A rhythm develops between your brain and your body as your hand dictates what you see with your eyes—sort of like the needle on a seismograph.

You have to keep your eyes on the object of your attention. Look down at your paper for too long and you’ll get lost. Planar surfaces become blocks of graphite; sinuous contours become a tangle of ink. If you’re drawing someone alive, you must interface with their liveliness. The rest—what you think constitutes the actual drawing—is just muscle memory and instinct borne from practice and repetition.

This is what I’d been missing. It’s what I came back for. And as soon as I had it, I knew there wasn’t anywhere else I was meant to be.

Conclusion

I could go on and talk about my most recent work²⁷ (figurative collage), how I developed it (with much frustration, insight, and random chance), and how it differs from my previous work (vis-a-vis material space and figure-ground relationships). But this blog post is already long enough; I’ve been drafting it for almost four five six seven months now.²⁸

I don’t think there’s a neat conclusion to this story. Partly because it is still in the making, but also because stuff like this never really ends. It just changes and transforms and rolls into the next thing.

Unlike butterflies, our futures aren’t waiting inside of us from the start. Unlike butchered meat, we can’t compartmentalize creative output into slabs of protein to be pulverized, processed, and presented on a plate ready for consumption. All we are is what we are, and what we are is measured by what we do.

I’ve been looking back on this chapter of my life for awhile now, and I’ve come away from it realizing that everything I used to worry about—my professional career or lack thereof, dreams of success and nightmares of failure, existential confrontations with a blank canvas or sketchbook, perceived judgement about myself made by-proxy through my art—were nothing but externalizations of the core problem. I kept trying to find something outside of myself to account for what was inside.

As long as I approached my art from this inside-out perspective, I’d never be happy with it. It was only until I dealt with everything I was suffering with internally that I was able to make art again.

I still struggle. Old anxieties rear up in moments of doubt. I get stuck on projects, procrastinate finishing them, and hesitate on starting. Sometimes I spent all day drawing; other times, I go weeks, even months without. But these problems originate from my work itself; they can be solved through my work, too.

The important thing is that I’m no longer rushing to fill up my hollow spaces. A drawing is just a drawing: part of myself put on paper, not the other way around.

A picture of me at work, taken by Jem.

Postscript

The content of this blog post spans nearly a decade of my life. Many of the events recalled were only made possible thanks to very important people. Although many of them will probably never end up reading this, I’d like to include them here as a practice of gratitude.

Special thanks to:

My late uncle, who would draw pictures of Blue’s Clues characters over and over again for me to watch as a baby; I was obsessed with the act of drawing before I could even hold a pencil.

My father—whose own father was an artist—for imploring me to make use of the my artistic inheritance, and working in a factory plant for thirty years to provide the means for me to do so.

My mother, for nurturing the inquisitive, sensitive, weirdo in me since I was a child, whether that involved dancing to Cher’s greatest hits, buying me boy clothes at thirteen years old, or helping me start testosterone.

My ex-step-mother, for supporting me during the pupal stage of my young adulthood, and helping me figure out the bus route to community college.

My partner, Jem, for believing in me when I didn’t believe in myself, and always advising me to follow my passions.

My original art teacher—I learned how to draw and paint at her in-home art classes, which I attended from second grade to sixth grade, and where I first realized art could be a safe respite from the world. I will always remember her soft-spoken voice, gentle guiding hands, and warm encouragement.

My junior high art teacher, an empathetic supporter when my mental illnesses began taking root. One day she offered me a one-on-one painting lesson after school, showing me how to layer watercolors by delicately painting an apple. Unfortunately now lost after several moves, I held onto that small painting for over ten years.

My high school art teachers, who were lifelines when my depression was at its worst, and helped me unlock my nascent artistic instincts. Struggling with about every single aspect of both my home life and school life, I was able to carve out a safe space in art class, the only place I really felt comfortable. In my senior year I undertook an independent study; it was the first time I dove into art as a serious creative discipline, and where I discovered my love of Abstract Expressionism, as well as two of my favorite artists, Keith Haring and Jackson Pollock.

My art history professor, whose lively teachings exposed me to an artistic legacy spanning thousands of years and the entire the human race. Her passion for the arts, culture, and history is more than contagious—it’s inspiring and invigorating, gifting an indispensable reservoir of knowledge to any prospective artist lucky enough to be her student.

The professor who oversaw my Figure Drawing II independent study in 2019. He pushed me not just as a student, but as an artist. Much of his advice was delivered in obscure, open-ended suggestions that were as infuriating as they were instructive. A figurative artist himself who studied under second-wave Abstract Expressionists in San Francisco, much of my own work is inspired by his, and the formative influences he exposed to me; I shaped most of my artistic philosophies through our galvanizing dialogues.

And lastly, my painting and drawing professor, who acted as my primary mentor and confidant throughout my time at college, and whose love for art and education is surpassed only by her love for other people. A teacher and artist in the truest sense of both words, she has an innate ability to find the best in everyone and help them achieve their fullest potential, whether that be personally or creatively. I am indebted to her for much of my artistic and personal development; had our paths never crossed, I would not be the same artist that I am today, let alone the same person. Thank you for showing me what I couldn’t yet see in myself, and still reminding me of my worth whenever I lose sight of it now.

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Images

(Click on images to open them in full-view.)

(Click images to open in full-view.)

A picture of me from around the time I started art school.

My usual setup in my mom's garage.

Back when time was measured in ashtrays filled and paint tubes emptied.

I couldn't finish a painting or drawing without at least one cigarette break.

I mainly stuck to non-objective stuff before college; I fell in love with Abstract Expressionism and Neo-Expressionism in high school.

More garage era work.

A larger example of my Neo-Expressionist inspirations (mostly Haring and Basquiat).

One of my first drawing classes.

My space at the painting studio on campus where I worked.

I did a lot of self-portraits. Each portrait was an attempt to uncover some part of myself I couldn't yet manifest externally.

My usual "uniform" at the on-campus painting studio where I worked, with one of the resident artists' dogs, Gracie.

My figurative studies became more investigative and dynamic as I developed my own style.

I broke away from my ultra-flat, heavy-handed graphic style, trying to find new ways of injecting dynamism into my figures.

Another figure study from The Human Figure: A Photographic Reference for Artists by Erik A. Ruby.

A sketch of a mannequin from my first figure drawing class.

My first try at gouache paint.

The second of my penultimate works, which shows more of my Abstract Expressionist roots.

One of my first figurative collages; I did a small series during my 2019 independent studies.

An early in-progress photo of my preliminary sketch for Arch.

A picture of myself toward the end of my initial term, decidedly less dead inside.

One of my Jungian-esque drawings; 2020.

A sketch from my transition into digital art; made in GIMP, 2021.

Screenshot from my first foray into using Krita (which coincided with my Nan Goldin phase).

An early digital abstract sketch; 2021.

A tentative return to my automatic figure compositions.

An unfinished painting of my partner, Jem, with my cat Marley; 2023.

A self-portrait; 2024.

A more experimental figure; 2024.

My first run with Krita's RBGA oil brushes; 2024.

My Krita config as of April 2026.

One of my first live sketches after returning to school.

My first attempt at a figurative collage, mid-process; 2025.

Another live figure sketch; 2025.

All of the collages I started in my first semester back at art school.

My first complete figurative collage; 2025. (It was also the first piece that I ever sold in a mobile-gallery.)

Sussing out the spatial relationships between my figures when they're displayed on a wall.

One of my newest figures (and the accompanying concept sketch).

The previous figure, freestanding.

Another WIP, near completion.

A picture from the day I embarked on my latest body of work.

A selfie from 2026, for comparison's sake. (Taken while finishing this post!)

Soundtrack

1. Something to Believe by Weyes Blood
2. Waiting Room by Fugazi
3. Nude by Radiohead
4. Librarians Would Kill for That Kind of Quiet by Dikembe
5. Pretty Machines by Parquet Courts
6. Learn to Fly by Foo Fighters
7. The Story of an Artist by Daniel Johnston

Footnotes

Related Content

• https://xavierhm.com/sketchbook/2024
• https://xavierhm.com/sketchbook/2025
• https://xavierhm.com/blog/a-blog-post-just-because
• https://xavierhm.com/blog/art-school-reunion-tour

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