Hello everyone,

Some of my favorite art highlights from this year! and big update on the last year and my personal life below. Spoiler alert its not great BUT it has a happy ending.

I hope this post finds you well and snuggled up with those you are close to this holiday season. Hopefully we all get the chance to relax and refuel to start the new year with a good foot forward. It feels like the whole year screamed by for me and it doesn’t feel real. With the new year quickly approaching I wanted to take a breath and reflect on my journey through 2025 and talk about the future. I will try my best not to overshare but it is without exaggeration that this was the worst year I have survived in living memory.

Between my long term relationship burning up and subsequent betrayals of once close friends coming to light in its wake, my spirits could not have been lower. The only thing I could focus on was art as my world outside was turned upside down. Although my work helped me scrape by I was miserable and never closer to giving up than I was at this time last year.

With the advent and rollout of AI and seeing the effect it had on my industry I am shocked I managed to stumble through 2025 at all. Seeing so many accounts swell to life while publicly or privately using AI was disheartening to say the least. It felt like an insult to all the hard work I have put into my profession and It sapped what little joy and motivation I had kicking during such a dark time in my life.

I can confidently say the friendships I had and the support of some truly selfless clients are all that kept me going. To them, who absolutely know who they are, thank you from the bottom of my heart. You are the reason I am still working and it is from your generosity that I can still create

Gratefully I will say that, at the end of this terrible year, fate has relaxed its death grip and pushed me into a better place. I live somewhere I can feel safe and the people who abused me are far away. This gave me the confidence to take a wild shot at an artistic dream I always wanted to experience and although that too did not work out, it is still 2025 after all, I made a wonderful connection and friend. They have been the shot in the arm I needed to dust myself off and walk forward.

Even though this year absolutely sucked and my productivity suffered tremendously from the cost of surviving it I am staggering through the burnout into the new year more hopeful than I have ever felt in years. The crushing weight of toxicity that was my old life lies in my wake, and good riddance for it. I find myself eagerly planning for the future and looking to my work with newfound love and excitement.

It feels like the last few years I had always looked to the next with trepidation and dread. This is the first time in a long while where I have looked at it with a smile.

Thank you so very much for reading this, I wish you a very happy new year and I look forward to filling 2026 with art <3