J. Godfrey
[email protected] Speaks/Reads: English -- J. Godfrey was born in Pittsburgh, P.A. before relocating to Texas with their mother as a baby. Growing up in South Texas among a strong Hispanic Roman Catholic population alongside a Baptist family, J. Godfrey is no stranger to religious iconography and the deification of martyrdom, pain, and seeking absolution through borderline-performative self-mutilation. They invite you into a headspace of watercolor, ink and gilding; where characters craft scars into tattoos and open wounds a testament to dignified suffering. Planetary halos are added to a salt wash background, animal familiars perched on bones with ghost flowers blooming from joints, emotional depths mimicing space and oceans that are both enthralling and suffocating. They began dabbling in creative writing via fanfiction for various cartoons and comics, before finding their niche in original character play-by-post roleplay games. They fell in love with the process: creating arcs, planning motivations and appearances, dialogue and relationships with other characters. They found their voice in writing short scenes and soliloqueys, straddling the line between thoughts and reality and how perception and trauma affect the boundary between. J shares their writing online through various platforms and personal blogs, while their visual work has been shown in local and out-of-town galleries and exhibits along the Gulf Coast and in private collectors' homes. If J were to sum up what they and their characters have in common, it’s being exposed in a moment of vulnerability and disconnecting oneself from their pain long enough to put on a good show. --- I’m frank about many things: being mentally ill, having strange family drama, being queer and navigating those relationships, gender ambiguity, the physio-psychological toll of grief, and various niche interests. I’ve been told it’s off-putting and alienating. Funnily enough, my work was described the same way by my late mother. She also described it the way she would describe me: unconventional, sincere, and ambitious to a fault. My mother taught me a lot pertaining to self-confidence and conviction, to remain firm in the face of criticism and to see things through - for the satisfaction of it, and the enjoyment of defying someone's expectations. I've inherited a lot through her: humor, a tendency to be nosy, and a voracious appetite for knowing the 'why' and 'how' as much as the 'what.' If I have the words to express a character, I write them, alternating between surreal soliloqueys and double-speak dialogues of tense relationships. And if I don't, I draw them with all the ugly bits on full display, sometimes rendering them in full color with watercolor and ink. My being frank, amongst other things, has received pushback in a conservative community and family, mostly in the form of "hate the sin, love the sinner" - a truce made of begrudging tolerance over acceptance. I found solace in angels, demons, and martyrs ascending their persecution to a higher calling - even if that calling was death, a reprieve from the messiness of being alive. But I also wondered about the baser emotions of these saints: rage, anger, disappointment at maltreatment and indifference; self-pity and self-loathing sharpened into bitterness and spite. Sometimes, a chip on your shoulder is all you need to retaliate. Men tend to be a focal point in my work from exposure to boys’ love and gay erotica and identifying more with momma’s boys than daddy’s girls both in real life and in media. Even the terms "momma's boy" and "daddy's girl" have baggage for me, feeling displaced in the middle of a dichotomy. I find something poignant in describing emotional anguish through a sex that is often disallowed their emotional reality unless it evolves externally, such as through violence or sexual prowess. Rifling through well-developed subtext remains infinitely more satisfying than taking what's there at face value. The times I do illustrate women tend to hit much closer to home, self-portraits in the guise of someone else: feeling trapped, isolated, so far in your own feelings, unable to navigate the storm while being written off as hysterical or having a monthly. Lately, these women have been more confrontational about that dismissal, choosing to wield the knife at the viewer as a warning. |