“I recently met Austin on the streets of Eureka, CA. He was busy cutting intricate patterns into the shadow portions of some black and white portraits from the pages of a book he’d come across while other homeless folk yelled in the air and bickered with the trees all around him.

After talking to him a bit it struck me that his creative drive in the midst of this discordant atmosphere was connected to his troubled past. Creation is the only salve he knows for those wounds, whatever they may be.

It also struck me that I have lived much of my life in the same way.

My entire creative career has been in many ways an effort to find some healing, some justification for my existence because at the deepest level I wasn’t sure I was worth my own life. I won’t bore you with childhood wounds, because we all have them, but after an intense season of self-reflection and prayer I have begun to experience true healing at last, and even though I haven’t been all that productive art-wise over the recent months, I wouldn’t trade this journey for the world. I pray we all might find the wholeness we were made for, and as long as we refuse to face ourselves, we remain divided within. Hence the title, and the encouragement: Face Thyself

And one of the great joys of this journey for me has been connections. A deeper connection with my wife, my family, friends, and even strangers on the street like Austin.

This isn’t a typical work of art for me, but it pushed me to consider my artwork from a whole different perspective. I hope you dig it.

I’ll be splitting the proceeds with Austin, who has been on the streets for several years now, and longs for a more stable life with housing and work. I know the money from this little collaboration alone won’t help much in that regard, he might just use it all on art supplies, but God bless ‘im, that’s okay with me.”

-Matt Beard