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When the World Stops Turning, The World Turns to Art.

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Struggling as a freelance artist during a time when people are obsessed with art and the work is shut down.  Photo by Ima Loop — 35mm film — 2015 My name is Ima and I am one of the thousands of freelance artists that live in Austin, Texas in 2020. On my social media all of my friends are sharing music that moved them, engaging in conversations about the latest TV show they binged or movie that they watched, praising murals that are plastering the city and posting about the last book they couldn’t put down. During the Shelter in Place orders, everyone I know is turning their focus on art to distract themselves and save their sanity.  In February my means of survival was selling paintings, working my ass off for 12 hours a day on film sets, being hired for photography shoots, odd jobs and some occasional carpentry assistant work for a good friend named Tom with “Dead Boy” tattooed across his throat and a big enough heart to give me a chance with no previous woodworking sk
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Self Love and Lactose Intolerance

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I have all these illusions that I am zen as fuck now. That the slowing down of my busy life has really taught me a lot. I have transcended to this higher plane of existence and my quiet mind really has it all figured out.  Transcending through Shutting in — Me 2015 35mm film In reality I am removed from the stress of being around other people.  I don’t have to think about how my actions affect anyone else and with the Shelter in Place I have given myself the permission to be entirely selfish under the guise that it is “Self-care”. Maybe this sounds harsh.  As a freelancer, I hardly get any breaks. I am constantly in the flow of networking and being around people to collaborate or build a community of mutual interests. With 12 step programs I am checking myself and being vulnerable with other addicts and alcoholics and being of service.  With the quarantine it is impossible to be in groups or meetup for work opportunities even if there were some. So I am at home takin
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Dreams of Death and Dancing Every Day

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I have always been a dreamer. Self Portrait 2016 Being a dreamer has it’s advantages as an artist. With the constant loop of thoughts, images, visions and stories I have never run out of content to create. I am rarely bored and I have an overflowing well of ideas for future projects consistently swirling in my mind, all I need to do is reach out my fingers and pull one from the ether. I can sit quietly anywhere and get lost in my thoughts. One of my favorite past times is sitting at a coffee shop or on a street corner and people watching. I make up people’s histories, names and personalities. I think of their wonderful relationships and drama. It reminds me that everyone has a complex and interesting life like I do. It reminds me that I am not the center of the universe. Sometimes I think about my own funeral and try to guess what people will say about me when I’m gone. How I’ve impacted people’s lives. I have to imagine a scenario where a room full of people would g
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The Art of Overthinking Cupcakes

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The only thing in my life that I have really mastered is the complex art of overthinking everything from a conversation to how I’m eating a cupcake. Overthinking helps me with filmmaking, photography or painting. I can look at a situation and see every possible angle or outcome visually in my head. I can make educated guesses and figure out how I would like to approach things. This helps me figure out the choices I want to make and why. In music, different version of lyrics flash through my mind. It’s an advantage for me in art and I understand that it is not a unique talent but I am aware of the benefits to me. Outside of art, it is an exhausting nuisance of a habit. I have entire conversations in my head before I’ve even picked up the phone and I think I can figure out every single possible outcome that could ever happen in any situation. Today I was overthinking eating snacks in my car during the drive home. Was I eating too fast or too slow? Were the other driver
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Relationships are like Getting Hit by a Drunk Driver

I was trying to figure out what to write about all day. I woke up late in the afternoon and spent too long in the shower and reading a book. I took some coffee to my lovely friend, Chris, while he was painting a mural and sat on the wall reading more actively avoiding writing for no other reason than I had committed to writing something, even if it is short, every day and I love avoiding commitments. I came home and procrastinated and then decided to take a drive to clear my head.  On the way back from my hour long drive it hit me.  Relationships.  This metaphor may only make sense to people who are as scared of driving as I am.  Relationships to me are like driving a car. Hear me out.  Maintenance and committing are key. Long relationships are like long road trips with someone that has a good playlist and better taste in snacks. Sometimes it gets scary like driving next to 18 wheelers in Dallas or when someone swerves into your lane. You have to watch your spee
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Cultivation of the Rational Observer so I can eat Casserole in Peace.

Four times a day, every four hours timed by an alarm on my phone, I swallow a little yellow capsule with the numbers “215” stamped on the larger side in blue. Without it my brain almost short circuits.  I’ve been putting off writing all day today because I was hoping I would find something else I would want to write about but at the end of the day, this is what is destroying the hamster wheel in my mind.  It took 8 years of trying new meds going off those new meds trying a new one or four or five at a time and never getting the chemicals right and lithium makes it so I can’t talk and I traded my Ativan for weed and adderall and sleeping too much and not ever sleeping and hallucinating and not being able to walk fast or think fast or thinking too fast or nausea or headaches and haloperidol and losing weeks of my life not being able to feed myself and going back off the pills and being impulsive and not being able to be a person just a different dangerous babbling version of mysel
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The Lesbians Drink out of Paper Bags with the Dogs in the Park

The bug is creeping back in. Seeping through the cracks of my mind like the openings in my childhood home, the ideas running and infesting like those tiny cockroaches that are impossible to get rid of. The last place I traveled to was Atlanta, Georgia in August 2018 with a man child who consistently told me that I was not high on his priority list. I thought I saw something in him, an author waiting to crawl to the surface and blossom but it turns out I was looking in a mirror. What I saw in him was the personality of an author and rampant alcoholism that matched my own but in the year and a half that I spent chasing him he only wrote one mediocre short film. I remember the female character as being a prop with no real personality traits which I later learned was how he looked at women. I was thinking about moving to Atlanta at one point because that’s where the film work is, but’s then I got there I couldn’t think of any reason I would move somewhere that was hotter than Austin. I
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