Untitled Print

I painted this in 2019 when I was jobless and living in a new city. I was really unsure about where life would take me and this represents the emptiness I felt then. I used a picture of myself as reference for lighting but ended up keeping more of my own features than I intended and this became an unintentional self portrait. (This seems to happen to me more than I'd like to admit.) I find it pretty interesting that I painted this unnamed piece about emptiness more than a year before I got my diagnosis for Borderline personality disorder. My disorder is characterized by a persistent feeling of emptiness. I was expressing it before I knew what it was. This painting is important to me both as a pure unfiltered manifestation of my then unknown disorder and as part of the start to a new direction in my art. This was the first larger work I made as a more mature person making "serious" art. The first piece that led me on this path was made in 2017 but my journey to becoming an "artist" is and has been slow.