I Can’t Finish a Face on Command

I can go weeks without finishing a piece.

Sometimes months.

That probably sounds strange if you think making art means sitting down, deciding what you are going to create, finishing it, and moving on to the next one. I understand why people would think that. A business has schedules. A website has deadlines. An exhibition has dates. I have things I have to get done whether I feel like doing them or not.

The art does not work that way for me.

If I force it, it comes out crappy.

I can technically keep working on an image. I can change something, move something, manipulate something, add more, take something away. None of that means I am still connected to the reason I started it.

And if I am not connected to that, I am not really creating anymore.

I am chasing.

The emotion usually gets there before the face

My process usually starts with an interaction.

It can be somebody I know well, somebody I met for an hour, a conversation, an opinion somebody gave me, a moment of vulnerability, somebody taking accountability, or somebody refusing to take accountability. Sometimes it is grief. Sometimes anger. Attraction. Disappointment. Hostility. Love. Joy. Sometimes it is just something about a person that stays with me after the conversation is over.

I believe we are spiritual beings having a human experience, and part of that experience is the people we meet along the way. Some stay for a day. Some for a season. Some for a reason. Some for a lifetime.

Any one of them can leave something behind.

That is what I start with. Not their face. The impact.

I always say, we do not experience ourselves.

You know what you meant. You know what you thought you said. But somebody else experienced your tone, your face, the thing you did not say, the thing you avoided.

Their experience of you may be completely different from your experience of yourself.

That matters because I am not trying to document another person’s version of what happened. I am creating from what the interaction did to me.

I am intuitive and very good at pattern recognition. I pay attention to people, contradiction, behavior, energy, and what sometimes is not being said.

And yes, I am a Cancer. I believe in that too. Whether somebody believes that part or not is fine.

I know how I experience people.

That is where the face begins.

I know when I am creating from the noise

The fastest way for me to ruin a piece is to start thinking about everybody else.

What is another artist doing? Is somebody going to take this idea? Do I need to make this bigger? Better? More dramatic? Should I be producing more because I have a business?

That is the noise.

The minute I start working from that place, I can feel the difference. I am trying to outdo myself instead of listening to myself. The work starts feeling commercial in the worst way.

That is when I am chasing instead of creating.

I have learned not to be so afraid of somebody taking an idea. People can mimic you. But nobody has my mind. Nobody has my history. Nobody interprets grief, anger, love, or disappointment exactly the way I do.

Two people can be heartbroken and create two things that have nothing in common because the emotion moved through two different human beings.

That difference is the point.

So when I am creating from the noise around me instead of from inside myself, I stop.

Some pieces belong to a version of me that already changed

American Divide and Fragmented Promises are good examples.

Those pieces came out of a political moment when I was shocked, frustrated, and honestly did not have much to say. Some of the work from that period uses deconstructed American flags and the words “No Comment.”

That was literal.

I did not want to comment.

At the time, the emotion was immediate. Then life kept moving.

Days passed. Months passed. The shock wore down. I still had opinions and concerns, but my day-to-day life kept demanding my attention. Bills. My mother. Work. Loss. Responsibilities.

Life was lifeing.

So I thought that political moment in my work might simply belong to that version of me.

And then, of course, I had to bite my own ass a little.

I said I might never make another political piece unless something genuinely moved me there again.

Then something did.

Much later, I was watching television and listening to what was happening around voting rights, transgender people, drag performers, and other things that made me feel like parts of the country were being pulled backward. I remember sitting there thinking one thing:

Why America?

That question stayed with me, and eventually it became another piece: Why America.

What is interesting is that I did not go back to “No Comment.” I was not in the same place anymore. The first time, I was numb and did not want to say anything. This time I had a question.

Why America?

That is a different emotion.

It also proved something to me about my own process. I can return to territory I thought I was finished with, but I do not return as the same person. The work changes because I changed.

I still do not consider myself a political artist. I do not want politics to become the identity of my work. But if something gets under my skin enough that I keep carrying it, I am not going to pretend it did not affect me just because I once said I was done with that subject.

Sometimes a piece represents who I was at a particular moment.

Sometimes, years later, another piece answers back.

Grief is the emotion I am most careful with

Grief is different.

Sadness is different.

Those are emotions I do not want to romanticize just because they can produce powerful work. Once you begin coming out of a dark place, you do not necessarily want to walk back into it because a piece needs finishing.

2:00 AM came from that kind of place.

The event behind it did not happen at two in the morning. It happened in the middle of the day. But our world changed that day, and it rattled me.

I had not experienced somebody that close to me leaving the earth. At the same time, I was trying to support people even closer to the loss. I did not know how to make space for my own grief while I was watching theirs.

I still do not know if I have processed all of it.

That piece became somewhere I could put some of what I was feeling, but 2:00 AM became a place I could not stay in for very long.

Sometimes I would work and then have to go for a walk. I needed to physically leave the feeling. Shake it off. Come back to the present.

The art can release something, but it can also tell me I am still grieving.

I do not want to keep tapping grief because it gives me material. Grief can move into other parts of your life and become another problem of its own.

So I respect it.

The art gives me somewhere to put the emotion, but I do not believe I am supposed to live there.

And grief has also made me pay more attention to being alive.

A tree. A building. Architecture I have walked past a hundred times. A beautiful bird. I do not like bugs, so we can leave the bugs out of this.

Those ordinary things can suddenly feel amazing when you remember none of this is guaranteed.

My unfinished pieces are a kind of journal

I did not realize this until I started talking through my process.

Everybody talks about journaling.

This is my way of journaling.

I can look at a piece and remember the person, the conversation, the disagreement, the vulnerability. I remember where I was emotionally and why I stopped. Sometimes I leave myself notes about where I thought the piece needed to go.

Then life gives me the emotion again.

I recognize certain emotions in my body and behavior. When I am angry, I feel hot. When I am melancholy, I might want a cocktail and old music. When I am feeling empowered, I want Todrick Hall and music that basically says, kiss my butt, world, I am here and I am doing my thing.

I know my patterns.

Sometimes I am in a certain emotional space and an unfinished piece suddenly looks different.

Maybe what I thought was a happy piece was not completely about happiness. Maybe I was moving from sadness into happiness when I began it. Maybe the work was sitting in that middle space and I could not understand it until I returned to that emotional neighborhood from another direction.

Then something pops.

The piece was waiting, but I had to catch up with it.

“You’re the artist.”

Knowing when to stop is another problem entirely.

Ask John.

He has been my best friend for more than thirty years, and now he works with me on the business. He will tell you I can be anal about details. I am always looking again, changing something, wondering if it could be better.

I hate calling myself a perfectionist because the work itself is not built around technical perfection.

These images can be fractured, divided, cracked, intentionally inconsistent. I am not trying to make a flawless face.

I am trying to know when the face has become what it was trying to become.

Sometimes I ask John, “What do you think?”

And I love him for this because he gives it right back to me.

“You’re the artist.”

Which is annoying and correct.

Sometimes the answer comes when I stop trying so hard. I will have a cocktail, go through my portfolio, and look without being in work mode. Then I come across one I thought was unfinished and get this bubbly feeling.

Oh my God.

I got it.

That is probably the closest thing I have to a finish line.

Once I call something finished, people can question every decision. Why that much white space? Why more black there? Why leave that part imperfect?

Sometimes I have an answer.

Sometimes I do not.

I am learning I do not need one for everything.

The cracks were there before Unapologetic Faces

Before the series became Unapologetic Faces: The Cost of Being Seen, I was thinking about it as Cracked Faces.

I kept meeting people who believed something about them was damaged. They had made mistakes. They were struggling. They did not feel good enough.

But the more they revealed, the more interesting they became to me.

The vulnerability. The accountability. The willingness to say, I did this. This happened to me. I got it wrong. I am still here.

I started seeing the cracks differently.

I could see light inside them.

That is when I began thinking, the cracks are what make us beautiful.

Then I met people who had moved through some of that. They were no longer apologizing for everything they had survived or every mistake they had made, but they also did not want to be reduced to who they had once been.

That is where The Cost of Being Seen became bigger to me.

Some people are struggling to be seen while they are still cracked open. Other people have healed and are fighting to be seen as who they are now instead of being permanently judged by who they used to be.

Both are asking for the same thing.

See me.

That is why imperfection matters. If I cleaned every strange edge and contradiction until the image became technically perfect, I would be removing what I am actually interested in.

It does not have to be perfect. It has to feel like it has finally become what it was trying to say.

Once I finish it, your interpretation is yours

This is also why I do not like overexplaining the work.

I have always gone back and forth about how much story should be attached to a piece. Even titles can tell people too much. I want you to have your reaction before I give you mine.

Art is subjective.

What fascinates me is that people can see something very different from what I experienced and still recognize the emotion.

They may see something different, but they may still feel the same emotion.

Somebody brings their own grief, anger, joy, relationships, and history. I have no control over what happens after that, and I do not want control over it.

That is the joy of art.

The piece started with one interaction in my life, moved through my imagination, became an archetype, and then somebody I may never have met stands in front of it and finds something of their own.

Now we have a conversation.

I cannot put that on a production schedule

There are parts of running Milton Wes Art that absolutely need structure.

I need deadlines. Calendars. Shipping dates. Exhibition dates. Emails that have to go out.

But I cannot run the emotional part of the work like inventory.

If I told myself I had to finish three faces this week because the schedule said so, I could probably produce three images.

I do not believe they would have the same wow factor.

I do not believe they would feel honest.

Unapologetic Faces became a series organically. I am proud of what it has become, but I did not sit down at the beginning and map out every face that needed to exist.

The work showed me what the series was while I was making it.

Sometimes I have to leave a piece alone for weeks or months. Sometimes I come back and realize I am a different person. Sometimes I come back and realize the work was already finished and I was the one who had not caught up yet.

If I forced myself to finish everything according to a schedule, I would lose the honesty.

And once that is gone, I do not know what I would be making anymore.

The faces are imagined. The people do not exist. But the emotions underneath them are real.

That is what I am protecting when I walk away.