White Shirt Project

I always admired art as a lurker, but the act of creation didn’t seem like “my thing”. I was horrible at painting while growing up and it seemed like a chore and a waste of time. I begrudgingly did it a few times but it never appealed to me. Somewhere in my early twenties, a small mix of sophistication, along with just a general sense of taste, got me into art. The first time I went to Europe, I remember walking for hours listening to music, looking around the city, and just being happy. Everything felt so much more colorful and precise and just how it should be. You felt a genuine delight when you looked at architecture and nature.

I then started to go to museums and I started looking at paintings and I think intentionally or unintentionally, strong feelings of judgment started to come in. Some pieces were really pretty, and then other things were just bland and ugly and repulsive (Cough Modern Cough).

For me, the first dimension of art is looking at something that inspires a visceral feeling inside of me. The second dimension is the story of what made it what it is (Think of Van Gogh losing his fucking mind in a mental asylum to make one of the greatest works of art).

I liked consuming but I wanted more, so the only way to be a genuine admirer of beauty is to partake in the act of creation. So I took out this white shirt and planned a special date night with M. I really liked her, so the long-term goal was to finish the shirt and gift it to her. Sadly that couldn’t work out as we stopped dating eventually(our hearts were elsewhere). So now I have this shirt that’s a memory of someone that I really cared about at one point in time (and still do) and there’s not much I can do with it.

Dostoevsky said “hell is the suffering of being unable to love” and it’s one of those things that sounds like a twisty philosopher one-liner to make misery sound fancy to craft a sad boy aesthetic, but I get it, I do get it. I was mopey but I wouldn’t want to be too mopey. Maybe I could turn this around.

So when life gives you a pretty half-painted T-shirt, what do you do? You either work on a relationship eulogy or you just find other cool people and start painting on it with them. So I kept painting this T-shirt and made it full of many easter eggs and people I know. I would just hang with people and ask them to paint it with me.

The Artists

Currently this painting has 6 painters:

  1. ME
  2. Lady M (duhh)
  3. Super pretty friend from the commons
  4. A founder who wanted to hire me lol
  5. Tech bro who just wanted to tech bro on my shirt
  6. A friend from Guatemala/SF

We made this shirt and it has many easter eggs like:

  1. Coffee addiction
  2. My friend painted as a panda
  3. Work projects
  4. Russian Cyrillic + Urdu words
  5. Flags of multiple countries
  6. Birthday wishes for friends

I don’t know what’s going to come of this shirt in the future. I think it’s an interesting shirt but I don’t think it’s pretty (not even close), but it’s still cool. If you would like to leave a mark on this work of communal art, just DM me and if we meet each other we will spend some time painting on this together. I want this to be a compendium of memories, some good and some BAAAD but that’s kinda what life’s all about.

Cheers!!