Making as Reckoning
To create is not to express, but to enter into conflict.
That may raise eyebrows. So be it. The studio is not a sanctuary. It’s not a space for escape or decoration, and certainly not for affirmation. It is confrontation. Not metaphorical. Not abstract. Often aggressive, sometimes violent. Always honest.
As an artist and combat veteran living with PTSD, I don’t go to the studio to relax. I return to it over and over because it’s where I must face things: the materials, the memories, and the fact that I’m still here when others are not.
Some see art as therapy. They build whole degrees around that idea. And yes, artmaking can be cathartic—but not because it soothes. It wounds differently. It reopens. It reframes. It forces reckoning. Materials resist. Clay collapses. Wood splits. Steel warps. They demand presence. They demand that you engage, and through that friction, something dislodges. The hand hesitates. Doubt creeps in. You make, and you unmake. You revise. You endure.
Art is not about what you build; it’s about what you face. The artwork becomes a mirror—not one that reflects who you are, but where you are in your becoming. You confront grief lodged in your spine, guilt that never sleeps, the echo of things you saw and did and can’t forget. In combat, you must shut down your humanity to survive. In the studio, you have to let it back in. To stay alive.
For me, making has always felt closer to combat than contemplation. Maybe that’s just how my mind has learned to frame adversity. But this isn’t about violence. It isn’t theatrical. It’s not against anyone else. It’s a private, inward reckoning. You’re not fighting an enemy; you’re confronting yourself.
One question haunts me: Is this life, this work, worthy of the friends I lost? Is art enough? I still don’t know. But doing nothing isn’t an option, even when depression pins me to the floor. I carry them into the studio—not as ghosts, but as gravity. I don’t create because I’m certain. I create because I have to keep moving, even when anxiety takes my ability to breathe. I’m not chasing healing. Some things don’t heal. But they might be livable. Barely.
Art, like trauma, is experiential. It doesn’t live in the object. The artifact—the installation, image, gesture—is not a conclusion. It’s residue. What remains after the confrontation. Not a message. Not a code. A trigger. A catalyst. A charged site. Something left for someone else to contend with, in their body, on their time. It happens in the doing, in the confrontation, in your guts. Like memory: fragmented, shifting, sometimes overwhelming. But in making, I hold the fragments. Sometimes they cut. Sometimes they connect.
I don’t make art to be understood. But I do want to open a door. Veterans often say, “Civilians will never understand.” Maybe that’s true—if we never speak. But confrontation doesn’t end with the maker. It extends to the viewer. A visual language can carry this weight without confession. If art is experience, let it be uncomfortable. Let it refuse to flinch.
For me, making isn’t often pleasurable. It’s about surviving the confrontation long enough to leave something behind. What’s left—the artifact, the image, the scrap of steel or mark on paper—isn’t art. It’s just proof that something happened. That I was there. That I kept going.
Maybe someone else will pick it up. Maybe they’ll feel something shift. Maybe not. That part’s out of my hands.
What art is will always be debated. I just know what it does. To do it. To be in it. To come through it, bruised but breathing.
