hyattlikethehotel

Not only is this my blog page but, it’s also a place the community can come and leave feedback, ask questions, and leave reviews! Just keep it family friendly please!

Why I write…

I’ve spent a lot of my life trying to figure out what to do with the things that happened to me.

For a long time, I didn’t have an answer. Good or bad.

Today, I paint them. I write them. I turn them into something I can put in front of another person and say, This is what it felt like, you’re not alone.

That is a big part of why this website exists.

I’m an artist and an author, but neither of those things started with some lifelong plan to build a creative career. They came from needing somewhere to put things I didn’t always know how to say out loud. Or they came from me not knowing what I was feeling except, I knew I didn’t like it so it had to get out of me.

My life has included addiction, prison, loss, recovery, cancer, relapse, second chances, and more than a few moments when the future I have now didn’t seem very likely.

I don’t create because I have everything figured out.

I create because I don’t.

Painting what i can’t explain

Sometimes a painting starts with an image in my head.

Sometimes it starts with a feeling.

A color, a memory, a person. Something I saw that stayed with me longer than it should have.

There are emotions i can explain better with a canvas than I ever could in a conversation. (even in a conversation with myself!)

That’s probably why a lot of my work leans toward subjects with some weight behind them. Fire. Water. Darkness. Faces. Isolation. Survival.

I’m interested in things that look beautiful from a distance but become more complicated the longer you stare at them.

Maybe because people are like that too.

Writing the Same Way

Writing eventually became another version of the same thing.

My fiction isn’t autobiography but I would be lying if I said I wasn’t somewhere inside of it. Matter of fact i was just telling my son that my fiction books are kind of like my memoir. Some of the people’s names are made up and some events are over dramatized but I’m writing from something that i experienced.

My characters are fictional but the emotions are not

My novel Borrowed Fire grew out of questions I’ve carried for years about addiction creativity, obsession, love, and the stories we tell ourselves about the things destroying us.

At the center of the novel is an artist trying to decide whether his addiction is giving him something extraordinary or simply convincing him that it is.

That question mattered to me.

So did the people around him.

I wanted addition to be more than a plot device. I wanted to show what it does to friendships, relationships, ambition, creativity, and the people who continue loving someone while watching them disappear.

And I wanted the characters to feel like people instead of lessons.

The Part That Matters Most

Recovery gave me something I didn’t appreciate enough at first:

Time.

Time to make paintings. Time to write books. Time to screw things up and try again. Time to discover that there were parts of me I had never really given a chance.

I can’t change where I’ve been, and I”m not particularly interested in pretending it didn’t happen.

I’d rather use it.

That doesn’t mean everything I create will be about addiction or recovery. I want to write love stories. Dark stories. Funny stories. Strange stories. I want to make paintings because an image refuses to leave my head.

But all of it comes from the same place.

I finally get to create a life instead of just surviving one.

So Welcome

This site is where I’m going to collect all of it.

The finished paintings and the ugly stages before they become finished paintings.

The books. The stories behind them.

The mistakes.

The experiments.

The upcoming projects.

Probably more than a few things that don’t work.

And occasionally, some of the things I’m still trying to understand.

If you found your way here because of a painting, a book, recovery, or just curiosity, I’m glad you did!

There’s a lot more coming!

-Hyatt Hendricks