An artist in the making

I Said What I Said:

I Will Drag....

我會讓你身敗名裂。

This work explores the emotional violence of reputational harm, manipulation, and coercion through a surreal digital landscape where moon-like forms emerge from a scarred, red terrain. Inspired by the phrase “I will drag you through the mud” and the accompanying statement, “我會讓你身敗名裂” (“I will ruin your reputation”), the work examines how threats to identity, credibility, and self-worth can leave lasting psychological wounds. The partially submerged celestial forms symbolize fragments of selfhood and memory struggling to remain visible beneath layers of conflict - as well as a direct reflection of the previous work Peace of the Night, showing how that internal peace is broken and destroyed. While the contrast between vivid reds and desaturated grays reflects the tension between emotional trauma and numbness. Iridescent textures move through the composition like distorted recollections, suggesting the lingering effects of gaslighting, isolation, and emotional abuse. As part of the I Said What I Said series, this piece transforms a harmful statement into a visual record of survival, reclaiming language that was intended to diminish and instead using it as evidence of resilience, self-preservation, and the enduring effort to maintain one’s sense of self.

I Said What I Said: Peace of the Night

夜晚的寧靜

Sure Can

Another snap shot of my sketches at the park from this past weekend - it was a lot of fun to capture people having a good time as well as meet new people and hand out my artwork!

Dad - The Ninja Warrior Announcer

This past weekend - before we got blasted with a winter wonderland here in KC. I went to the park and did some life sketches of families at the parks and gave out my sketches. I took a picture of some of them bring them to life again in procreate.

THIS IS LONELINESS

(這就是孤獨)

This is loneliness—not loud, not chaotic, but a quiet, steady calm. A kind of understanding that settles in and stays.

The stone and concrete surrounding this piece act as a window into my internal psyche—solid, unmoving, protective. It’s a space where I’ve met my own loneliness, where I’ve sat with it, spoken to it, and walked alongside it through time.

Within that stillness, there’s color. A multicolored aura that represents the vibrancy I carry—the energy, emotion, and life that continues to exist even when surrounded by heaviness. But that color doesn’t exist untouched. It presses against the stone, contained, protected, and at times, suffocated.

In the bottom right, the heart compresses—strained, condensed—pushing out everything it has left to give. It glows, but there’s a quiet truth within it: even vibrancy has limits. There’s only so much it can release before it begins to fade.

This piece reflects my relationship with loneliness—past and present. Not just as something painful, but as something familiar. Something I’ve come to understand.

Because within that understanding, there is also peace.

A calmness in solitude.

A comfort in knowing that even in isolation, I am still whole.

IS THERE A LIMIT?

( 是否有限制 )

This piece sits with a question that has slowly worked its way through my own life: What happens when we encounter a limit? Not just physical limits, but emotional, mental, and existential ones. The moment when a realization appears and quietly asks whether something can only go so far.

The surface carries the same stony texture that has become symbolic of my internal landscape—how thoughts settle, harden, and slowly erode as I process them. At the same time, the colors erupt across the piece in vibrant bursts. Inkblots, supernova-like explosions, and waves of color expand outward to represent emotions as they bloom, collide, and intensify.

At the center sits a heart.

The color radiating from it represents emotion building and bursting outward—the moment the heart encounters the possibility that something might have a boundary. That realization can be both cold and calming, a strange mixture of acceptance and tension.

Across the front of this explosion of color are repeating Mandarin characters that ask the central question: “Is there a limit?” The text acts almost like a cage or barrier around the heart. The question itself becomes physical—something that contains the emotion behind it.

The heart does not hide its feelings by choice. Instead, the question stands in front of it, holding the emotion back. So the heart finds another way to speak: it explodes in color behind the words.

Because some emotions are too visceral to simply be contained—they have to bloom somewhere.

MEMORIES AND EXPERIENCES

(記憶與經歷)

I have always known something about myself: I rarely take photographs of my own life.

Photos of myself, achievements, milestones, or even everyday moments have never held much importance to me. Part of this comes from a quiet resistance to vanity. I have never felt a strong need to witness my life through that lens, and because of that many experiences I have had were never documented in the typical way.

As I’ve gotten older, that hasn’t really changed.

In a time when digital media and social platforms encourage us to capture every single waking moment, it sometimes feels like the quiet intimacy of simply experiencing life is slipping away. Moments are filtered through a phone before they are fully felt. A memory becomes a file before it becomes something internal.

This piece, Memories and Experiences, reflects that tension.

The zig-zag ripple pattern pools and bends color across the surface like waves of recollection folding into one another. Sections were erased and reshaped to allow new colors to emerge, mirroring the way memories shift over time. Layered paper textures form a stone-like surface that surrounds the composition, representing the memories that feel permanent—those deeply embedded experiences that remain even without photographic proof.

At the center, however, the surface breaks.

A torn paper form reveals another space beneath it: a night sky scattered with marks that resemble distant stars or quiet writing across darkness. This rupture reflects something essential about memory— even the most vivid ones soften, blur, and slowly unravel with time.

Yet within that opening there is possibility.

Where one memory begins to fade, another experience waits to take its place.

Another moment.

Another sky.

Another story waiting to unfold

DID THE JOURNEY END?

(旅程結束了嗎)

Inspired by the Cup of Zen story “A Traveler’s Weight,” this piece reflects on the moment when a traveler believes they have reached the end—only to realize that endings are simply openings into another path.

Mandarin characters move across the composition like markers along a road. Ink blots and masked textures breathe through them, suggesting that understanding is never fixed—it shifts, fades, and returns again.

A mountain exists here, but only as an echo.

Smudged. Abstracted.

Felt more than seen.

The stone-like textures throughout the work remind me of the quiet calm I find when exploring complex emotions. There is a stillness in that space—a cold, reflective clarity where thoughts can settle and become something visual.

Because perhaps the truth is this:

The journey never really ends.

It only becomes another beginning.

I SAID WHAT I SAID

STONE STATE

(我不知道我的情緒究竟在哪裡…)

This piece from my I Said What I Said series continues my exploration of ideas and emotions as something meant to be presented openly—offered, exchanged, and examined without limitation. The series has become a creative playground for me, a space where there are no restrictions on medium, texture, or vulnerability. In this work, I wanted to create what feels like a stone of emotion—dense, cold, immovable—while simultaneously expressing the absence of emotion. It reflects that internal duality that happens when you can feel something inside of you, textured and solid like concrete, yet you don’t know where it lives or how to access it. The Mandarin characters read “我不知道我的情绪在哪里…” — literally translating to “I don’t know where my emotions are…” — a quiet confession embedded into the surface. The cold, colored concrete texture mirrors how my internal psyche appears to me during introspection: layered, hardened, protective, yet holding something beneath it. The glow within the text represents readiness—an illumination suggesting that the emotions are there, prepared to be released—but locked behind a hardened wall, unable to move or be fully accessed. This piece lives in that tension between feeling and numbness, between awareness and uncertainty, between knowing something exists within you and not yet knowing how to reach it.

MIND MESS

(腦子他媽的)

Continuing with the feelings and ideas from I Said What I Said, this next work Mind Mess is a visual attempt to capture what it feels like when your mind gets whiplashed by conflicting information, directions, and expectations — the internal chaos of not knowing how to reconcile what you think with what you feel.

In the artwork, a set of red characters appear in motion, swinging like a bat that strikes the brain and warps it — a visual metaphor for how sudden, jarring information can hit your thought processes. The brain is bent, concussed by impact.

The blue characters in different shades represent parts of me — my favorite color — being jolted or forced outward, altered by that impact. They symbolize how conflicting information doesn’t just shake your thoughts but changes them in unexpected ways.

The dark vignette around the piece reflects the unseen effects — the kind of inner chaos rarely visualized but deeply felt.

This kind of information whiplash creates cognitive dissonance, a psychological discomfort that occurs when a person encounters conflicting ideas or information that challenges existing mental patterns. Cognitive dissonance is experienced as internal tension, stress, and energy-intensive mental conflict as the mind tries to resolve incompatible thoughts.

When beliefs, expectations, or instructions contradict one another, the brain must rapidly shift, reorganize, and attempt to reconcile these contradictions — a stressful internal conflict that can feel like a “mind mess.”

This piece is my way of giving form to that experience — a visual language for something we often feel but can’t easily explain.

I SAID WHAT I SAID

I AM FEELING...

(我感覺…)

This piece is part of my series I Said What I Said.

It’s graphic. Emotional. Honest.

This series has become a capsule for me — a place to put emotions when I don’t feel like there’s anywhere else safe for them to go. I’ve learned that bottling things up leads to disaster, so I let the work hold what I can’t.

Emotions are complex and nuanced. They aren’t always something that can be explained in a short answer.

Recently, while trying to explain what I was feeling, I was told there wasn’t enough time to do so. That moment created emotional whiplash — being encouraged to share, then being told there isn’t space for the explanation. That contradiction triggered something old.

It felt like past trauma — being told to do one thing, only to be met with a completely different expectation afterward. That perpendicular shift activates fight or flight. Even when I logically know I’m okay, my body reacts to the sudden change.

In this piece, the white characters say, “I am feeling…”

But they’re breaking apart — pierced by another line stating there isn’t enough time. The heart appears compressed, while color and ink explode outward. Those bursts represent not just sadness or anger, but joy, fear, confusion, hope — emotions moving in every direction at once.

This work captures the experience of completing what was asked, only to discover the expectation has shifted.

Art lets me process the whiplash instead of internalizing it.

YOU BROKE MY HEART, I AM SO HAPPY YOU DID

Over the week end I had the liberty to judge a speech and debate tournament and I was able to judge DI (Dramatic Interp.) and needless to say there were three ladies that performed their works and I was in tears through their performances - they were brilliant works of art to take shape right in front of me.

I know I am a very emotionally responsive person when I am looking or listening to artwork that is compelling and has my full attention.

This students performance was absolutely captivating and brought me to tears - in all the best way possible.

I give this compliment not lightly but to those performers in speech that truly are creating great works of art.

Hey all, a little late in announcing this but I was featured in another magazine.

Canvas Rebel - Feel free to check it out.

Here is the hyperlink: https://canvasrebel.com/meet-aj-sharpe

In know I have not posted a lot recently, but there is a reason.

Film making. I am working on a film. Here are some concept designs that I have made recently. I am figuring out what brushes and design styles I am leaning towards. I have finished storyboarding the first act and there are 2 other ones to be done (Lots to do!!).

However, I am excited and enjoying the process of this work as well.

SADNESS IN THE RAGE ROOM

I recently came across a series of rage room videos that started out almost humorous — chaotic, exaggerated, performative. But the longer I watched, the more something shifted.

It wasn’t dark. It was human.

One video in particular stayed with me: a woman who, after repeatedly smashing a TV beside her, suddenly stopped. The adrenaline was gone. The noise was gone. And she just… broke down.

That moment became the foundation for this illustration.

Rage is often the loudest emotion in the room. It’s active. It’s powerful. It fills the body with adrenaline and direction. But when that energy burns out, something else often takes its place. Sadness. Grief. Exhaustion. Vulnerability.

Anger can be protective. But when it dissolves, the core emotion surfaces.

In this piece, I kept my sketch loose and gestural — shifting between light and heavy mark-making to mirror the emotional swing from explosive force to collapse. The broken TV remains in the composition, not as a symbol of destruction, but as the aftermath — the silence after the noise.

I intentionally created an aura around the main figure. Not to suggest power, but to make the internal visible. The intensity of the blue surrounding her reflects the sadness that rushed in once the rage left her body. It holds her in that quiet, exposed moment.

That blue is sharply juxtaposed against the orange and red graffiti on the walls and the bleak cement floor — colors and textures we might traditionally associate with aggression, heat, or chaos. The contrast emphasizes the emotional dissonance between the space she’s in and what she’s actually feeling.

Because sometimes the loudest spaces hold the quietest breakdowns.

This piece isn’t about destruction. It’s about what happens after.

NOT FOR A $

I do not create for the sake of money — and yet I do not resent it. Whether a piece sells for a little, some, or a lot… that is not why I make it. Money is a byproduct, not the purpose.

I make art to share ideas, to reflect emotion, to explore thought and process. At its deepest root, art has always been about communication — about connection.

Long, long before galleries, before markets, before currency, humans made marks on walls. In the Chauvet-Pont d’Arc cave in France, we find some of the earliest known figurative drawings in the world, but they are not primitive. They are sophisticated, expressive, dynamic — the first known expressions of human creative genius carved in stone over 30,000 years ago — a testimony not to commerce, but to thought, presence, and spirit.

More than a thousand images remain, preserved through time — animals, movement, meaning — evidence that art was never about price, but purpose.

Too often today, the worth of art is measured in dollar signs and prestige. But many of the artists we revere most in history lived and died without recognition, without praise, without financial reward — only finding value long after they were gone.

Mediums change, tools evolve, but the act of creating — to communicate, to question, to witness — stays the same. From Paleolithic walls to pixels on a screen, creation continues: not for a $, but for the shared language of what it means to be human.

Artist Website:

Finneganstudios.com

Resourced Website:

WHEN ARE YOU GOING TO GET BACK INTO ARTWORK?

My answer to that question—the one that titles this work—is simple: I have always been creating. Only the medium has shifted.

I carry a deep disdain for this question, not because it is curious, but because of the shallowness it casts onto work that is not born of traditional mediums. It reduces art to materials rather than intention, process, or vision—and often, to its perceived market value.

Too often, art is measured by price tags and prestige, as though worth can be calculated in dollars. History tells a different story. Many of the most prolific artists created in obscurity, without recognition, praise, or financial value. Some never knew their work mattered. Many of the artists we revere today did not receive accolades until decades—sometimes fifty to one hundred years—after their deaths.

And yet, this way of thinking continues to fracture the art community—where graphics, animation, and digital forms are treated as lesser, as though their value dissolves without canvas or pigment. If digital art were truly so dismissible, why do institutions rush to expand, to include, to inquire?

Inclusion often arrives with conditions: separation, hierarchy, the quiet insistence that one form must remain superior to another. Yes, traditional arts are the origin. But origin does not grant dominion.

The camera did not erase the painter. It freed them. It widened the field, loosened the borders, and allowed creation to breathe beyond its former limits.