Comfort is a fucking lie we tell ourselves. Pretty is a lie. You want pretty, go buy a goddamn Hallmark card or scroll through Instagram until your eyeballs bleed from all that curated, soft-focus horseshit.
These portraits of Niki, this is what an artist actually looks like. Not the romantic bullshit version, not the tortured genius cliché, but the real thing: someone who’s spent years elbow-deep in materials, making things that matter, carrying the weight of all that vision and all that failure in equal measure.
Black-and-white doesn’t lie. It can’t. It strips away the anesthetic, takes that face, this beautiful face, and throws it right back at you without apology. No escape hatch. No “oh isn’t that nice.” You’re looking at someone who creates, which means you’re looking at someone who destroys and rebuilds and questions and doubts every single day. All of it’s there in the eyes, in the set of the mouth, in the way light cuts across bone.
That’s the point. That’s the entire fucking point.
It’s confrontational by design. It says: here, this is what it costs to make things that matter. You think you can just glance away? Every line, every shadow, every moment captured, it’s evidence. Evidence that art isn’t some precious, elevated thing. It’s work. It’s obsession. It’s the lived experience of someone who can not not create.
The shame part? That’s not cruelty. That’s recognition. I see myself in that gaze. I see my own compromises, my own abandoned projects, my own hunger for something real. I see the common struggle we’re all pretending doesn’t exist while we’re busy performing our carefully constructed personas.
A real portrait doesn’t seduce. It accuses. It testifies. It refuses to let you, or Niki, or me, off easy. It says: this is an artist. This is what that actually means. Deal with it.