Timeline
This comes up a lot lately, so I wanted to have a space on the site to explain.
Round 1 (3 years, 4 months)
August 2012 – November 2015. My first significant stretch of time not shooting heroin. Beginning with my arrival at Tranquil Shores and ending three months after the most traumatic episode of my life. This was not only when I first started making art, but the time in which I actually built an art career.
Relapse 1: December 2015 – September 2017 (1 year, 8 months)
Blip 1 (8 months)
October 2017 – May 2018. My second period off drugs and making art. Beginning when Wallis and I fled my warrants in Jacksonville and moved to Bradenton. Ended the weekend we moved into our new apartment in Sarasota. I finished 5 paintings in this period but made no effort to re-establish myself as an artist. (No gallery contacts, no events, not even an illegal sidewalk set-up).
Relapse 2: June 2018 – October 2018 (5 months)
Blip 2 (6 months)
November 2018 – April 2019. My third period off drugs and making art. Started when Wallis and I broke up for good and ended not long after I started dating Juliana. Only finished 3 paintings. Again, made no attempts to re-establish myself.
Relapse 3: May 2019 – March 2024 (4 years, 11 months)
Round 2 (ongoing)
April 2024 – present. My fourth period off drugs and making art. But only the second time when I got far enough to go BACK OUT INTO THE WORLD WITH IT. The clean time and the return to art started shortly after Juliana and I broke up (or at least stopped living together), but my return to the world / “public life” started 7 months later, about a month after I finally cut her out of my life good. (I’d thought I needed someone to motivate me to succeed. It turned out I needed the absence of someone in order to regain my focus).
So my hiatus from being a “real” (working) artist started at the end of 2015 and didn’t end until November of 2024. That’s nine years. I just updated this timeline. It’s currently November 2025. I’m still clean. And because even Round One was punctuated with three tiny little relapses (ranging from 1-2 days to 1-2 weeks), I’m currently on my longest streak of clean time ever. If I make it to April 2026, it’ll be two years.