Time Travel - Portrait of the Artist at the Age of Three

To create art, I inhabit my subject. I’m not sure about other artists, but for me, the act of painting is pure empathy. When I paint landscapes, I become the ocean, feeling the wind in my hair, the water receding from my tides. When I paint succulents, I feel the pain of the spines erupting from my skin. And when I paint people, I try my best to inhabit them, to be Clarence Thomas or RBG, Joe Biden or my Mother-in-Law, my mom and my brother. So I did this experiment. I decided to go back in time and paint myself as a young boy, to feel what it was like to be young again. I looked through old photos and got a sense of my subject. I thought and thought about those times. And then I found this photo of me and my brother when I was 3 and he was 4, sitting criss-cross on a balcony in my Grandmother’s insane upper west side apartment. And it worked. For the two weeks I painted this, I traveled through time. I remembered what it felt like to be shorter than a countertop, to be flexible like a