Lately I’ve been spending some time with older work. Pieces I haven’t looked at in years. Not to fix them. Not to rework them. Just to sit with them.
It’s strange how different they feel now.
Some of it still surprises me. Some of it feels more tentative than I remember. Some of it feels braver. And some of it looks exactly like the person I was when I made it.
I used to look at older work and see mostly what I’d do differently—the technical choices, the things I’d “clean up.” Now I notice something else first: the intent. The mood. The moment in time it came from.
I’m realizing that the work doesn’t change nearly as much as I do.
Maybe that’s part of the point of keeping an archive at all—not to measure progress, but to remember where certain ways of seeing began.
This particular self-portrait is from 2018. At the time, I was practicing layering textures onto photographs in Photoshop. It was one of my first real forays into digital art—taking something I’d created outside the digital space and rebuilding it with imagination and instinct instead of tools I fully understood.
When I first shared this image, I paired it with a quote from Hermann Hesse:
“When a tree is cut down and reveals its naked death-wound to the sun, one can read its whole history in the luminous, inscribed disk of its trunk: in the rings of its years, its scars, all the struggle, all the suffering, all the sickness, all the happiness and prosperity stand truly written, the narrow years and the luxurious years, the attacks withstood, the storms endured.”
At the time, I think I was drawn to the drama of it—the idea of layers, of damage, of history made visible. Looking at it now, the quote feels less like a metaphor for the image and more like a description of the process itself. The work, the years, the changes in how I see and what I notice first.
Revisiting this piece doesn’t make me want to fix it. It makes me want to understand it—and the person who made it—a little more gently.
