I painted this self portrait from a photograph the New York Post and Daily Mail ran over and over again alongside horrible stories about me. They averaged about 3 stories a day between them for years. The image came from their complete theft of my digital life. In the photograph I am in the worst stretch of my addiction. Exhausted. Contemplating how I could end everything.
They published it over and over because they believed it showed something disturbing, something degenerate, something people would recognize as evidence of whatever they were accusing me of that particular day.
I set out to paint it because I wanted to take back what they were trying to steal from me. It wasn’t just the image they had stolen. They had stolen thousands of images. They wanted to steal my humanity. Their portrait was of a monster. My portrait is of a man being reassembled piece by piece, bit by bit, pixel by pixel through the hard work of recovery.
A portrait of someone worth saving. Someone worth forgiveness. For all of me. Past. Present. Future. Gratitude for all of it.
The images they meant as weapons are no longer weapons to me. The man in them is no longer theirs to describe. He is mine, and I love him.
We do recover.
A fan in right field during the Blue Jays/Orioles game just threw a baseball at Jesus Sanchez and injured the right fielder. Sanchez left the game after this bizarre incident