The Watcher Was Never Just an Eye
The eyes in my work aren’t there because they look cool\. They came from the feeling that something is always watching, judging, measuring, and waiting for you to become who you said you would be…
“INSPIRATION”THE WATCHER
SHAM
8/22/20262 min read
People ask about the eyes a lot.
At some point they became one of the most recognizable parts of my work, but I never sat down and decided, this is going to be my symbol.
They just kept showing up.
At first, I didn’t completely understand why.
The more I painted them, the more I realized the eye wasn’t really a character. It was a feeling.
Being watched.
By other people.
By the internet.
By expectations.
By the version of yourself you keep promising you’ll become.
And eventually, by your own work.
That became The Watcher.
It isn’t surveillance in the literal sense
The Watcher represents the pressure of being conscious of yourself all the time.
Knowing what you could become while being painfully aware of how far away you still are.
You can be making progress and still feel behind.
You can have thousands of people looking at your work and still wonder whether any of it actually matters.
You can build something publicly while privately having no idea whether it survives another month.
The eye became the easiest way for me to communicate that feeling without explaining it.
That’s why I repeat it
Repetition matters in my work.
When something keeps appearing, it starts becoming less like an image and more like evidence.
The Watcher appears across paintings, clothing, pages, drawings, videos and objects because the feeling follows me across all of them.
Sometimes it looks threatening.
Sometimes protective.
Sometimes completely emotionless.
That depends on what I was dealing with when I made the piece.
The strange part
Eventually I stopped feeling like I was painting the Watcher.
It started feeling like I had created something that was watching me.
A reminder that I said I was going to build this.
That I was going to keep working.
That I was going to turn all of this confusion into something physical enough that another person could stand in front of it and feel understood.
So when you see the eye, that’s what you’re looking at.
Not a logo.
Not decoration.
A witness.
It’s also lowk my god but yk nvm
