When I think of why the more melancholy feelings inform my art, I often return to something Rebecca Solnit wrote in her essay, The Blue of Distance: "We treat desire as a problem to be solved, address what desire is for and focus on that something and how to acquire it rather than on the nature and the sensation of desire, though often it is the distance between us and the object of desire that fills the space in between with the blue of longing. I wonder sometimes whether with a slight adjustment of perspective it could be cherished as a sensation on its own terms, since it is as inherent to the human condition as blue is to distance? If you can look across the distance without wanting to close it up, if you can own your longing in the same way that you own the beauty of that blue that can never be possessed? For something of this longing will, like the blue of distance, only be relocated, not assuaged, by acquisition and arrival, just as the mountains cease to be blue when you arrive among them and the blue instead tints the next beyond. Somewhere in this is the mystery of why tragedies are more beautiful than comedies and why we take a huge pleasure in the sadness of certain songs and stories. Something is always far away." As artists, I believe that we’re already instinctively attuned to the idea that longing, absence and sadness are not symptoms to be fixed but modes of being to be felt. Much like any kind of feeling, sadness has the power to expand us, to assert that we feel and tha we exist. It gestures toward what cannot be prised from us, even if paradoxically it's a reflection of our desire, our want for things that we can never have. To say “don’t make sad art because it won’t sell” is to misunderstand both what art is and why we make art. I didn’t want to create art to conform to markets. My art and style is not a marketing strategy. I create to feel witnessed, to witness others who may feel the same way, and to transform and speak the unspeakable. Creating art that is dark, sad, or melancholy isn’t just an aesthetic to be packaged into a product in the hope that it’d be hung onto a wall or kept locked in a ledger. It’s a radical form of honesty. It’s me saying that I exist. It was never our job to be digestible. Artists have always rebelled against the norms of our time. Dare to be one of them. Dare to make art that resonates with you; art that witnesses you even if it unsettles. Especially if it unsettles.