I know my paintings have been labeled as “cubism.” I understand that the art world likes to classify them as bizarre, unrealistic, and whimsical. But please believe me when I say that my face really looks like that. They tell me that I’m creative, that I’m whimsical, that I’m an iconoclast to paint something so bizarre. I tell them, that’s just how my face looks.

“Such wild shapes!” critics say. “That’s just how my face looks,” I respond. To me, seeing all of these shapes on a face is normal. My nose has always been a semicircle. My mouth has always rested atop my forehead in a zigzag fashion. My work is not the stuff of a wild imagination but simply a quick sketch of my own reflection. I look in the mirror and see what I’ve always seen: a single eyelid in a sea of teeth. This is my reality, and I am tired of having it discredited as “avant garde.”

Vincent van Gogh and Frida Kahlo painted their faces and no one batted an eye. In fact, people found these portraits beautiful. But when I paint my face, people think it’s abstract and experimental. How are my three eyebrows, nine chins, and singular, Cyclops-like eye any more unusual than any other painter’s image?

Please, I beg of you, hear me. Recognize me. See me. See my face. My glorious, geometric, trapezoid-laden face.

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