As I’ve spent the last year painting and participating in art shows—a sentence that still feels wonderful to write—I’ve noticed something about successful artists. Many of them seem to enjoy being performers. They record themselves creating, build personal brands, work a room with practiced ease, and cultivate audiences as intentionally as they cultivate their art. There is nothing inherently wrong with this. In fact, many seem genuinely energized by it. Yet every time I observe it, I feel a familiar resistance arise.
The feeling surprised me at first because I couldn’t quite identify its source. I wanted my work to be seen. I wanted people to engage with it, enjoy it, debate it, or even dislike it. What I didn’t want was to become the salesman again. I could clearly see the path. Create videos. Build an audience. Develop a recognizable persona. Show up at every opening ready to shake hands and tell the story. The formula wasn’t mysterious. The problem was that it felt like putting on an old suit that no longer fit.
Initially, I framed this tension as a conflict between art and marketing. The more I sat with it, however, the more I realized that wasn’t really the issue. I wasn’t rejecting promotion. I was rejecting identification with another role.
Throughout my life, I’ve inhabited many roles. I was the guy who appeared in admissions videos for Naropa. I was the guy with the beard who owned the vintage shop. I’ve been a streamer, a marketer, a manager, and a philosopher depending on the season of life. Looking back, what’s interesting is that all of those identities were real. None of them felt false. Yet none of them were the whole story either.
Each role reflected something true about me, but only partially. The world naturally compresses people into understandable categories. It turns living, evolving humans into shorthand. Vintage Shop Guy. Naropa Guy. Artist Guy. These labels help people orient themselves. They create familiarity and make social life easier to navigate. The trouble begins when we start believing the shorthand ourselves.
As I reflected on this, I realized that my discomfort with artist marketing had less to do with visibility than I originally thought. I don’t mind being seen. I don’t even mind being known. What I want, perhaps more than ever at this stage of life, is to be recognized.
There’s a difference.
The salesman wants to be noticed. The artist wants to be recognized.
To be noticed is attention. To be recognized is resonance.
The distinction feels subtle, but it changes everything. Attention is volume. Recognition is connection. One can be manufactured, optimized, and scaled. The other emerges unexpectedly when something genuine passes between people.
This realization helped me understand why the common advice given to artists feels misaligned for me. I don’t want to stand at the trailhead with a megaphone introducing myself to everyone who walks by. I would rather leave a trail and allow curiosity to do its work.
The paintings are part of that trail. So are the essays, the bird and snake imagery, the philosophical frameworks, and the strange collection of symbols and ideas that seem to follow me wherever I go. They are breadcrumbs scattered through the woods. Invitations rather than advertisements.
If someone follows them, wonderful. If they don’t, the work remains.
There is a quiet freedom in that realization. Not because I no longer desire connection, but because I finally understand the kind of connection I’m seeking. I don’t want to be noticed by everyone. I want to be recognized by the right people—the ones who pause in front of a painting a little longer than expected, who feel something they can’t quite explain, who follow the trail not because they were persuaded to, but because something about it called to them.
Perhaps that is all art has ever been. Not a performance. Not a sales pitch. Simply an invitation extended into the world with no guarantee of acceptance.