What ‘Shooting Star’ Means to Me

When we started Gypsy Cadillac, I knew we were in for one hell of a ride. That wasn’t a surprise, it had already been one, but now we had a few more eyes to share it with. Finally.

People seem to see our friendship as dynamic, endearing, and—at the very least—entertaining.

To me, it’s simply real.

We laugh, we travel, we drink wine, we listen, we cry, we have fun, we fight, we challenge each other — we support each other.
Healing all along the way.

We do life our way.

We live, laugh, love – just kidding ;)

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I couldn’t be more proud of the exhibit Valarie curated for ‘Shooting Star’.

She created something truly beautiful, deeply moving, and absolutely deserving. Every single detail was thoughtfully, carefully, and intentionally done - like most everything else she does.

Through this exhibit, Valarie opened the door for both the artists’ themselves, and those who knew them, to share their stories—their grief, their struggles, and their unseen experiences.

Mental wellness… we don’t talk about it much, not enough anyway. Sometimes maybe we don’t know how, or maybe we’re just afraid or simply don’t want to go there. Honestly, sometimes— there’s just not really a window to open up into something so deep to someone you just met – let’s be honest.

Shooting Star broke open that idea, and in doing so, it gave people a reason to share, to connect — to feel less alone.

I cannot imagine it was easy for her. To revisit, to think about, to dig up art, to wrap her head around the bittersweet balance, to be aware and plan so everyone felt seen — to overall take a deep breathe into it. I have never known how she does it, any of it. Not even from my vantage point.

Thru the years seeing her wrestle such an unimaginable pain… that I can do absolutely nothing about…whatsoever… is needless to say…helplessly crushing. I don’t need to explain it – I’m certainly not an expert.

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Planet Earth is a beautifully broken place. Mind-blowing and unexplainably stunning in so many ways with its sunsets and bright eyes, but completely devastating in so many others. There’s a lot of friction. Injustice. Loneliness. Cruelty. Heartbreak. The whole place often feels woefully mismanaged, and it’s hard not to spend time wondering what we're all actually doing down here. What is the point?

To me, art is the translation of that chaos. Turning it all into something we can connect with, or make sense of, keep things interesting with, have fun or get lost in.

It has this unexplainable ability to make something click within you, to shift your perspective, to make you feel or to simply set you free.

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The poet. The rebel. The thinker. The gentle. The observer. The prolific. The bougie. The badass. The sandwich maker.

Rosino had a swagger, an edge, that made him undeniably cool.

His authenticity is what grounded him—embodying truth and the raw honesty of the human experience.

And he did it well.

I didn’t know him long, but that’s who I knew.

As a stubborn creative myself, it’s hard to leave me without a rebuttal, just ask Valarie, but I don’t think anything has been more eye-opening on the subject or had the ability to render me as speechless as this -

Rosino taught me – literally said to me -  “the point of his art was not to have the solution, that’s not his job, the point was feeling”

At the time in my life I was unwarily chasing that whole “who I was suppose to be” myth, and what he said, while eating a lobster roll, in LA of all places, and talking directly about it — stopped me in my tracks and changed the way I saw it from that point on. It removed the idea that something had to be “this way” or “that way”. Youre not trying to solve something. There was no “way”. That’s the point.

Art at its very basic is the honesty of feeling, it’s translating those feelings, however raw or messy or unmessy, or just because you have to get it out of you through whatever medium.

Often it connects us with those who feel the same, took something away from it, or even those who didn’t know how to explain it until you gave them the words—or the image, or the sound—to understand it.

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Shooting Star to me represents these artists’ who poured their unbelievably prolific talent, their experiences, their emotions, and their truths into their work because they couldn’t have it any other way.

Not always to be seen, but creating art for the sake of art. To feel and articulate actual life.

So what does ‘Shooting Star’ mean to me… watching Valarie curate all of this….

Well…can you only imagine?