Inconsistency = Chaos?

Right now in my studio I have a roll of brown-craft paper on a drawing table, some markers, brushes and paint, about 10 rolled canvas leaning in the corner, half-finished art toys, video game prototypes and interactive art-stuff across two screens. None of it matches.

Am I doing it right?

The world likes categories. "You're a mural artist." "You do digital illustration." "Wait, are you figurative now, or abstract?" Hear it enough and it starts to sound like an accusation.

Galleries want artists they can catalogue. So do brands. Algorithms reward consistency too. Fair enough. I've just never been able to hold still that long.

Nineteen years of practice. The work I made back in 2010 has almost nothing in common with the 2020 work, which has almost nothing in common with what I'm making now. Different tools. Different context and things to say. I could've locked in a style early and ridden it out. Too stubborn for that.

Frame-by-frame animation taught me patience. Heaps of it. It also taught me to look past the still image, to anticipate and follow through. Spray paint on a wall lets me move my whole body. Oil pastels are frustration transferred onto a surface. None of it looks like it came from the same person.

Distracción, reclaimed timber masks about the faces we wear socially, sits miles from the #SOSVenezuela illustrations, or from the Sapito Coqui art toy.

This all cost something. People who found me through murals get confused when I post a digital experiment. Followers who came for political illustration don't always know what to do with a smiling timber mask. Some jobs pass because the work won't sit in one category. People like specificity. I don't have much of it to offer.

I've made peace with that. The alternative is repeating myself indefinitely, and I lose interest in things I repeat.

When I jump from murals to animation to tech to satirical cartoons, is because each medium is different door into the same room. Human behaviour, self-presentation, the spaces we move through. A new tool just adds vocabulary.

From outside it looks like chaos. From in here it's the same question, asked with better tools.