Love Island, 2026, oil on canvas panel, 11x14”

I have an annual summer job. It’s unpaid and emotionally taxing and filled with body horror, but it also makes me laugh and learn the children’s slang and just the other day, it breached the defense walls of my Prozac and made me cry. I am talking, of course, about watching Love Island.

Love Island is a reality show where young hot dummies live in a villa/panopticon in Fiji to find love. There are “bombshells” who periodically come in and join the cast and break up the couples, and there’s a week where either the men or women1 go to Casa Amour2 to see if their current couples can withstand the separation. Periodically, the public can vote3 for islanders to get kicked out, returned, etc. At the end of the season, the people vote for their favorite couple and they win $100k. I don’t know why I’m bothering to explain Love Island: it’s exactly what you think it is.

It’s exhausting to watch something every single night (except Wednesdays) for two months, and maybe there should be an abridged post-season edit of each season so future viewers don’t have to slog through 40 episode seasons. But the pace is what makes it hypnotic—you’re there with them every step of the way as the hot dummies circulate, as their pretenses fall, as the show becomes what every dating reality show eventually turns into: the Stanford Prison Experiment.

It’s perfect laptop-in-bed TV, which is what I tried to depict in my painting. My cat’s never paid much attention to TV in her 16 years of life, but she’s as glued as I am. Maybe it’s the bright colors. Maybe she can sense the miracle of this particular season, that two of the hot dummies make me want to fall in love again.

Bryce and Trinity are absolute weirdos who genuinely seem to have built a connection. She is hilarious and gorgeous, he correctly uses phrases such as “moral paragon” and “slut shaming” which makes him the island’s genius. During Casa Amour, they pined for each other; he was literally the only man to not mess around over there. They have the kind of love that I love—two dorks whose faces hurt from how happy they are to see each other. Not Lizzie and Mr. Darcy, but Jane and Mr. Bingley. When they reunited after Casa Amour, crying and running into each other’s arms, I shed a tear. Maybe there’s a lid for every pot. Maybe it’s a miracle that human beings, as strange and horrifying as we are, are capable of love and intimacy and change.4

Or maybe the cat likes to watch Love Island with me because it’s literally the only time I am sitting still. Probably that one.

N Broadway Geese, 2026, oil on panel, 16x20”

There’s a theory that the reason children’s drawings look wild is because it’s how they are processing spatial information. In “Creative and Mental Growth,” Viktor Lowenfeld and W. Lambert Brittain discussed a child’s drawing of himself waving at a passing boat:

[The boat] isn’t really upside down. . . . After drawing himself on one side of the baseline, he walked around his paper and drew the other side of the bay and the ferryboat. . . . This concept can best be understood if we fold the paper along the baseline on which the boy is standing. We then share the experience of the child standing upright and facing the boat. If we fold the other side of the bay upright also, we get a model of the scene and we suddenly realize the interesting concept of the two skies. . . . Now both skies are folded up. . . . This is a perfectly valid concept: The child wants to draw both sides of the bay simultaneously because both sides are important.

Why am I talking about art education theory? Because I think this is reason I make 50% of my art. I, too, am making sense of what I see. Despite being born and raised in the South, it baffles me. The cognitive dissonance one must build to live here, the disconnect between the area’s natural beauty and occasional genuine kindness but also the hostility and ignorance enshrined in our laws.

These unruly geese make a certain kind sense to me. So I paint them, again and again.

Taco Bell Geese, 2024, oil on canvas, 16x20”

Honk Honk, 2025, screenprint on paper.

I love ungovernable creatures. There is a direct line between my admiration for my local headstrong geese who hold up traffic on a regular basis in front of Taco Bell to my soft spot for Real Housewives such as Lisa Barlow to my love of the Arby’s that is overrun by kudzu. Nature (and yes, I am counting Lisa Barlow as a force of nature) finds a way over human order and control.

One of the most interesting things about the Real Housewives franchise is that it’s about older female bluster. Maybe I admire bluster and willfulness because I’m so hard on myself. I am a perfectionist, which means I tend to treat myself badly. Perhaps part of me wants to rebel (against myself?). Be ungovernable.

Lisa & Brittani, 2025, oil on canvas, 16x20”

Portrait of a Lisa Barlow on Fire, 2026, oil on canvas, 16x20”

In addition to adding to my geese oeuvre, I repainted an image from Real Housewives of Salt Lake City that I previously painted in November. Why am I painting the same things over and over again? Why am I reheating my own nachos?

Part of it is the aforementioned perfectionism. In this case, I knew I could do a better job. Not to toot my own horn, but I wasn’t wrong. Is there something safe in returning to a subject I’ve already depicted? Kinda like how people rewatch the same TV shows as comfort because they know what will happen. Control in an uncontrollable world.

We don’t consider The Greats™ reheating their nachos when they paint the same things again. Monet painted the Rouen Cathedral over 30 times. David Hockney (RIP) completed 45 major oil paintings of his dachshunds, which doesn’t even count the hundreds of sketches. But am I really putting my stupid paintings of wildlife and reality stars on the same level as them?

Know thyself: I am absolutely going to paint those geese again. I stand by my love of reality TV, the most consistent sociological study in modern times. I’ll try to branch out. But at the end of the day, it’s painting. It’s not that serious. Who cares if I’m ever a Great™? In this climate?

Here’s the thing: you can reheat nachos to be pretty good. Don’t use the microwave, reheat them in the oven. Thank me later.

My backyard. Oil on linen, 16x20”

Queen Ciara. Oil on panel, 9x12”

I somehow got into the habit of painting every day for the past 3.5 weeks. I don’t understand, either. I’ve had good art days and bad art days, but the exciting thing about a regular creative practice (oh god, just typing those words made me stare at a wall for a while) is that I think my style is emerging.

I’ve been frustrated with my paintings for a while. There were good techniques that I was getting better and better at, but they lacked the sheer weirdness and playfulness of my drawings. I think it’s precisely because I was focusing on technique and depicting exactly what I saw that I played it too safe. Recently, I gave myself permission to take big swings and get freaky in my paintings. Who cares if it looks wonky!

At first, I thought this meant I was trying something new, but I realized: I’m just returning to my roots.

Gone with the Wind, oil on canvas, 2010.

I worked graveyard shift while I was in undergrad. The consistent lack of sleep resulted in my paintings being absolutely bonkers. But I also think part of me painted bizarre thing and leaned abstract because I never learned how to draw realistically. Fifteen years later, I totally flip-flopped.

I guess this means I’ve come full circle. Bonkers surrealism, boring realism, using references and classical techniques but getting silly with it. Okay, maybe not full circle, but… a lazy river. It forms a loop. It makes a certain type of sense.

Study of Jade. Oil on canvas, 11x14.”

Listen, I’m still figuring out how this Substack is gonna work. I envisioned that I would post a comic or completed painting every week. But I’ve been doing this thing where I “slow down” and “take my time with a painting.” 🙄

I’ve been trying to learn how to paint darker skin tones. I’ve taken some local portrait and figure painting classes, but the models were all white. I asked the instructor how to paint darker skin tones, and she said to just use darker colors. Which isn’t correct! There are nuances. Duh.

This portrait is the first out of ~6 practice studies on this subject that wasn’t a complete disaster. There’s a lot of room to grow but I think I finally got somewhere that isn’t downright offensive.

Portraiture is a puzzle. There are so many elements to balance—not just skin tones, but musculature, feature placement, facial planes, the eternal mystery of how to draw ears. I’d compare it to Sudoku. If one number is off, the whole thing falls apart.

Wait, different metaphor! By only knowing how to paint young, thin white people, it’s like if you only played the mini crossword in The New York Times’ games section. Baby, there’s a whole world out there—Tiles! Spelling Bee! PIPS!

Wait, am I implying that the mini crossword is white privilege? Listen. Work in progress! Mama needs more java. Mama needs to get Queen Bee on the Spelling Bee before she publishes anything on the World Wide Web. Mama needs to underline, bold, italicize the concept of “don’t rush 🙄” for all areas of life.

Study of Carole, oil on panel, 11x14 inches. Trying to branch out of painting the same types of people, so this week I tried: wrinkles.

I wouldn’t say with my full chest that I’m skilled at very many things—I am a self-critical Virgo, after all—but I think I’m pretty good at moving past creative blocks. Not to further toot my own horn, but I gave solid advice about this on Reddit today (haha, ugh). Naturally the post got deleted because the author got defensive and combative in the comments, but hey, this might help the ones of people who read this…

Find joy in the process. Play silly music while you paint, watch absolute garbage TV in the background, whatever lightens the mood. Laugh at the things you get wrong, knowing you’ll work on them in the future. Paint the worst painting you can think of, making every wrong choice, knowing it can only go up from there.

Remember that struggle means you’re learning, and it’s NORMAL to be bad at something at first. Dedicate time to drawing fundamentals for sure, but remember that painting is fun.

When I wrote scripts and got writer’s block, the thing that powered me through was, “How can I write this scene in the dumbest possible way?” Perhaps this was obvious, in retrospect. This does mean that I rarely make truly gritty art.1 Painting, in particular, is an act of love for me. It’s why I paint friends and scenes from Bravo and my local Taco Bell geese.

This isn’t to say that I don’t get frustrated from time to time. I get irritated when my talent doesn’t match up with my ambitions (again, Virgo). There are times where my hands get shaky; lately, I’ve been having trouble out of nowhere with eyeballs; I hate drawing buildings or anything without eyeballs for that matter; washing my brushes is a pain; sometimes I JUST DON’T WANNA. But when I reach that flow state of painting for a few hours while listening to Jock Jams? That’s me at my happiest.

This is my philosophy: life is hard, laugh when you can.2

Media: pen, ink, alcohol markers, acrylic markers, Procreate for lettering & dialogue bubbles