I don’t have my work from art school anymore. Not the sketchbooks, the canvas experiments, or even the giant charcoal disaster I once called “a study in chaos.” All that’s left are a couple of grainy scans of photos, taken back in the pre-smartphone days when you developed film at the drugstore and scanned prints one by one.

I’m not sure how it all disappeared—moves, carelessness, or my youthful habit of tossing the “old” to make room for the new. The scans that survived? They’re far from masterpieces: some charcoal trees, heavily textured experiments, and a few abstract pieces I probably made on an all-nighter with too much weed. But now, they’re priceless. They’re not just snapshots of what I made; they’re glimpses of who I was.

Losing all that work taught me that art isn’t just about the finished product—it’s about the messy process and the story behind it. Those lost pieces shaped the artist I am today. And maybe that’s the real lesson: art lives in us, in the way we keep creating, no matter what we lose along the way. 

Update 2024

With some AI magic I was able to scale up the 200px images I had to a decent size pics for our times. Enjoy!