What is this website, and why have I created it?

I’ve spent over half of my life creating (or at least attempting to create) art in a number of different media, from written word, to paint, pencil, photography, woodworking, sculpture, stained glass, and pretty much anything else you can think of (though there’s a few things I have yet to try). I’m far from “the best” at any of these things, and while I entertain notions that it might be nice to be the best at any of these things, I’m generally quite content to just keep learning/attempting new things and seeing if I can incrementally get better at the things I enjoy doing.

But what does a creative person do with creations after they have been created?

Most of the physical things I created have been given away years ago to the first person to say they liked them (except for a handful of things that were created for specific people). For a decade or so, I put pictures online through Xanga, MySpace, Facebook, and other social media, but over time I began to feel that I was struggling to use these spaces in healthy ways, so I stopped after running into a marginal amount of resistance from external factors (broken phone).

The only problem is that I still had all of this stuff I have created over the years just sitting in files on my computer. Years and years and years worth of time spent in frantic pursuit of… something, but sitting on hard drives, accomplishing nothing apart from existing.

I created this website because all of these old creations still mean something to me, even if I alone see worth in them.

And I suppose that’s another reason. In 2022, my mother passed from breast cancer. In 2023, my father passed from pancreatic cancer. They were my biggest fans and supporters throughout my life, without whom I never would have created anything in the first place, and their profound absence leaves a void in my life that, much like a collapsed star, seems to steal the very light from the sky. Knowing that they enjoyed many of these things I have created, all I can hope to do in their memory is allow others to enjoy these same things as they once did; better than the alternative, for these things to be lost to everyone, forever, sitting mostly forgotten on an old hard drive.

So this will be a place for me to… organize, share, and catalog things I have done over the years. Stuff I found artistic merit in, stuff I still have sentimental value for, even stuff that is probably irrelevant to everyone save some trivial contextual detail that explains whatever import it may have once held.

If you’re here, I hope you find something you enjoy. This website is as close to a catalog of my life as there ever will be, so if you can find something of beauty or value, then I will be pleased to share that with you.

I’m not doing this because I have any delusions of grandeur; the internet has made it trivially easy to find better art than anything I can create.

I am doing this because if one person sees one image and it speaks to them, that’s something. And it’s enough.

So if you’re here, thanks for taking a look. I hope something speaks to you.

-Erik