Voices

“I created a project to go super deep into my grief to figure out how I grow. I’m like a lot of people — I thought grief would just kind of minimize itself. And it’s like, no. You grow around it.”

“I literally wrote in my journal — ‘paint every day for a year’ and underneath that, ‘make a documentary about it.’ That was as far as I knew the details of how that was going to go.”

“The emotions of grief are coming at you so fast. I can’t just wait and go, okay, I’m going to do another pass of this big canvas. I needed to do a lot more than just this big canvas. That’s what led to the rapid iteration — a painting a day.”

“The last painting was very strange because I used my brother’s ashes in it. I had to physically handle his remains. I turned to my wife — am I done? What? I don’t even know what’s happening right now. And she just starts crying. Then I start crying.”

“I’m such a visual person that being able to express the intricacies of grief through a visual medium gives more potency to what I’m feeling, as opposed to just listing out a ton of words that may describe how I’m feeling.”

“One of the counselors said grief needs to find a home. The canvas was that home — where I wanted that grief expression to find its place.”

“When you have something visual in front of you, it acts as a mirror of sorts. The hard thing about talk therapy is you go, you talk — and then you just forget what happened. You’re like, I think I said that thing last week, maybe.”

“Don’t be shy to use creative materials. Go get some cheap paints and just make a mess. However you’re feeling. Even if you think you’re the dullest creative person on the face of the planet, you’ve got it in there somewhere.”

“People who watch the documentary don’t consider themselves creative — and then they go paint. When you’re in a creative mode, it does something different to your brain that breaks you out of just the very logical, overly rhetorical way people can tend to think.”

“I am having a terrible day and you bring up so-and-so just died, and people get real stiff and awkward. This happens every day to people. It shouldn’t be this awkward for us to talk about.”

“People pretend that grief kind of goes away or just doesn’t exist after you have a few days or a week off after losing somebody.”

“You devalue the experience that people go through by suggesting there’s some sort of time limit attached to grief. There is no limit to the stages of grief you might have to go through.”

“People suck at talking about grief. We’re not very good at just addressing — hey, we’re human, we’re going through things. How do we move through those? Not live in this constant state of victimhood, but how do we grow through them?”

“You don’t realize how big of a piece someone is of you until they’re gone. Siblings are a really unique relationship — you grow up with this other person and they are forming you. There are pieces of you that you share.”

“My brother’s passing threw me into a tailspin of — what am I doing this all for? I was sitting at the dinner table with my kids and they’d ask how was your day, thumbs up, middle, or down — and I was just constantly thumbs down. What message am I sending my kids?”

“My brother’s death was something that leaves you in real, true, utter disbelief. But part of doing the documentary and going through the historical aspect of it was like really having to delve into all the different ways that I might understand grief.”

“One of the biggest things I learned is that you grow around grief. You think it’s going to shrink and eventually vanish. It doesn’t. But the more intentional you are about working through it, the more you really become that better version of yourself.”

“What the ending does — in showing the whole piece — is make it less about me and more about you getting to reflect on your own process. I didn’t want people to walk away thinking only about my grief. I wanted them to think about how they could be equipped to think about theirs differently.”

“This 10 by 20-foot mosaic is sitting in my living room. Contractors, service workers, friends — people would walk in and go, ‘What the heck is this?’ And out of the blue they’d start telling me wild stories of loss. I started using it to test people’s reactions. It was so trippy.”

“I still have all the paintings in boxes in my house. There are 4,500 backlights that play to music. I know the impact it can have — people need to see it in person. I want the public showing to be the addendum to the documentary. The chapter that still needs to be written.”