I Hate Myself (new painting and music release announcement!)

hey i’m nathan and i hate myself that look on your face! like…ugh it’s a weird thing to say and admit because i don’t really feel depressed i’m a pretty like happy guy and in fact probably for my whole life i’ve just felt like maybe i’m a little too happy i mean don’t get me wrong i get depressed and like brian wilson “sometimes i feel very sad” just like all of us it’s not all like bright and sunny but because i’m mostly happy i’ve never really considered the idea that i might not have the most positive self-image but one thing i’ve definitely always been is creative and for some reason i felt like because i have to be up here on the stage that that might show that i’m selfish that some part of me says oh i have to be in front of people that makes me bad and evil that idea that i’m bad and evil just reduces into a basic distrust of everything that might come naturally to me and because i suspected that i might be evil and manipulative and controlling and only have my own self-interest at heart it made me pass through the world never wanting to express myself always feeling guilty about expressing myself in my relationships i would always try to put them first which is good it’s important to put people before yourself but if you do it like i was doing where i just bury who i am bury my identity bury my thoughts and feelings it just becomes my own personal way of conforming it makes me doubt who i am and who God made me to be but because i truly believed that deep down inside i was this selfish person, what other choice would i have? and so as i found myself burying every part of me i would refuse to say how i felt about things and i would just put on this smiling face and become fake and become something that i’m not which just created a lot of… [creepy sounds] deep within me that i couldn’t really find a way out of i truly feel like any time i express my needs what i’m doing is putting myself in front of other people and that makes me believe that i’m an evil narcissist but i learned that a narcissist doesn’t actually think about other people like a true, clinical narcissist is only able to think about themselves and so the very fact that i’m like considering the needs of others and trying to figure out what i can do to help them that shows that i’m not actually a narcissist so if i distrust myself so much that i think that my needs aren’t worth expressing then these things that i thought were selfish are actually self-worth and these things that i thought were humility were actually self- hatred fundamentally i was building up a case against myself trying to prove to everyone around me what i knew about myself deep inside which is that i’m terrible but i’m not terrible i’m not terrible. i’m not terrible i have to believe that because if somebody came to me and said “i’m selfish and evil and everything i do is for my own self- interest” and then i looked at their life and i saw them desperately trying to put everyone first in everything they did i would tell them you’re not terrible that means i have to tell myself that i’m not terrible but like i said i’m an artist and so i started writing songs that just explored this idea of self-loathing and just expressed it from as many angles as possible the goal being that i can put it out there and say this is my work, this is me at my most self-loathing and now i can move past it and so i wrote and recorded an e.p. of five songs and the e.p. is called “i hate nathan stryker” and it’s gonna come out on black friday…

because obvious but it’s just gonna be free to stream 04:17 - um…we can explore how my self-loathing tells me that i can’t make something for sale either.. i can’t conquer that thing too so i’ve written these songs, i’ve recorded them, honestly as i’m listening back to them –this is so hard for me to say– i think they’re the best thing i’ve ever done just as music, and as songs and as an honest perspective of me as a self-loathing christian and i’m truly excited for you guys to hear it i don’t have artwork and i need to paint something for the cover! i thought i’d start by showing you some of the more recent art pieces i’ve done to honestly get myself inspired for where i want to take this my paintings have kind of been going towards this idea of peeling back layers so i think that’s going to show up in the art for the album cover the first time i explored this was through a painting i created a few years ago called “sea glass”… it’s right here it just kind of takes this idea of the ocean and you’re pushing back layers to see deeper and deeper and are also getting some distortion out of that too the ep that came out last year was called “for my house” and i made a little tiny painting for that i think this one’s moderately successful i don’t like that it looks so much like a house but just the idea of brightness and beauty within but you have to push back the layers to really see that and that takes us to my first ever self-made full-length album which i wrote and recorded in february called “we are the empress” and i absolutely love the art that i did for this again you’ve got those themes of peeling back layers combined with the royal purple that gets peeled away and adding to that the pain and the bloodiness of that removal so how can i explore this idea of peeling back layers in a new way with themes and colors that really express self-hatred honestly the thing that really strikes me is the idea of a mirror and in my first attempt i did kind of a like broken bloodied mirror…it looked terrible! my friend aaron also suggested the idea of like putting a target on my face honestly the main problem i have with both those ideas is they’re just so self-destructive and while i am exploring the idea of hating myself i don’t think the result of that as expressed in the actual content of the album is particularly violent and so i want to get rid of that violent aspect and really dig into the ennui of “no me” okay wow! i just had an amazing artistic painting session it didn’t turn out anything like i thought i just had the idea of what am i looking for what am i missing? and it’s serenity so in this context it means that i accept that i’ve got this self-loathing tendency and i’m gonna notice it and change it when i can first i just painted the idea like in an impressionistic style of serenity kind of a serene landscape just kind of using some of the methods i’ve developed for creating textures where i blot some colors and spread them with a wider brush along, uh, one specific sense of direction in this case horizontal! even though i don’t like doing landscapes and i don’t really like representational painting for myself and my work and hopefully it’ll get abstracted enough to not really read as a landscape so once that level dried i started taping down the next level to create a layer that i would peel away but when i was thinking about the theme of the album how do you reveal the fact that you’re hiding? expressing that i’m holding back because i don’t think i have anything worthwhile within me using the masking technique i decided to try using a paper towel to blot gray on top to kind of tamp down the tones that were there that didn’t work at all so then i just flipped them the other way and just blotted the gray directly onto the canvas that grayed out the canvas completely and so i used the putty knife to kind of scrape off a lot of the gray so that the colors underneath would show through at this point i was happy with how the gray sections looked so it was time to peel off that top layer of tape and see how the contrast between the full brightness and the grayed out section worked and when i saw what was beneath…

i hated it! 08:43 - and not in that good “i hate nathan stryker” sort of way and as i stared at it i realized that i could probably just continue blotting from the gray that i have and just gray out the whole thing so it’s less of a high contrast of this is gray and this is not and more of a blend from the full color to the desaturated section so i peeled off those top two borders, titled it and signed it and i’m so happy with the results i love that none of the ideas i expected to have going into this came through i didn’t imagine this as the cover for the e.p. but now that it’s done it’s absolutely perfect and i love it i can’t wait for you guys to be able to listen to it and to really present this e.p. for the whole world on black friday of course i’ll have a video on that day kind of announcing it and maybe even having a music video…or two so if you want to see that when it comes out i hope you’ll like this video and subscribe to the channel thanks so much for watching and i’ll see you next week it caused me to push away…i don’t know i don’t need to get too personal because i’m not getting too– i mean i don’t need to get too personal because there’s nothing personal about saying i hate myself i’m having a really hard time getting to this do you know what i mean? [sigh] .