Two: I draw crowns not because it is good but because it is right
There's a scene where Jeffrey Wright as Basquiat is just making, hands moving faster than the thought behind them, and something in a Blockbuster-lit basement in 1998 reached through the television and drove a stake into the bass of my medulla. It's still in there. I was a junior. Deep In It, the specific flavor you only get once β the year your becoming-self and your being-self fight in a ditch behind the school while something older just watches, taking notes.
Basquiat's work didn't argue. It came through the wall already swinging, the drywall dust and knuckle blood, thrown in the dark by something that stopped caring whether it connected. That the-world-isn't-working-and-I-refuse-to-pretend-otherwise grimace matched a frequency I didn't have language for yet, because at seventeen depression doesn't arrive as a sentence you can diagram. It arrives as WEATHER; It's a black front rolling in low, soaking up through the floorboards. His art was already speaking that dialect. I thought it was mine too.
I'd spent years failing to draw with some sort of correct hand that never existed and always coming up short enough times that I just stopped reaching. But, here? HERE was work that spat on correct. Crude lines like something scratched into a cell wall by a prisoner counting days. Teeth like fence posts. Crowns torn off a king mid-execution, which feels extra prescient today and it still landed like a fist to the nose. It stamped into me that the image doesn't need to be right. It needs to be TRUE. Loud. Bleeding. There.
I won't pretend the myth didn't sink its hooks in too, deep enough to hit bone. Being IN the room where the century cracks open β I romanticized the hell out of that, and if I'm honest I still do.... Some part of me still believes there's a Right Crowd out there, gathered behind a door I haven't found yet, and once I find it I'll stop being the kid outside the frame, breath fogging the glass.
I don't think that room exists. I think I know that. Doesn't stop the wanting. The wanting doesn't care what I know.
What I've got instead: a stylus, a Procreate canvas, and a deliberate theft, committed in broad daylight with no remorse. The piece above is me trying the mask on for size β the crude crown, the raw teeth of line buildings, color fields bleeding into each other without apologizing after, that red vein-work at the bottom like something underneath finally got angry enough to split the skin and come up for air.
It's okay to just do the thing. Basquiat didn't give one rotting damn about some tidy, sanded-down notion of success. He just made the mark and let it be ugly and true and his. So: just make the mark. Let it bleed if it wants to.