Artist Statement

I am a figurative artist working in painting and drawing. I create portraits of individuals that are part of my life. I like to look back on the past and see how certain individuals have helped influence the person I am today. The time length of my interactions with these individuals vary. While I have engaged with some individuals for a majority of my life, my engagement with other individuals is brief though I still hold them close to my heart. 

People need human contact in order to survive. Everything from verbal conversations to physical embrace is a way we open ourselves up to knowing one another. I aim for my work to recognize people of color and celebrate the individuality within them. In recent works such as Deception Glazed in Green and Mental Focus, I do this through the use of two primary colors that vibrantly highlight the subject. I place them in a blank environment as a means for the viewer to focus solely on the figure in features of their face, clothes, and gesture. 

My work comes out of my effort to define my identity while growing up as a mixed race child. Factors that pushed me to deal with these questions in my work include the tenuousness of my relationships with a lot of my own family. The slow process of building the figure is a personal attempt to both recreate and establish the memory of an individual in my own way. While a few portraits are based on real experiences, many are envisioned as a result of my fear to share my true and authentic self with others.

I am influenced by the work of Jordan Casteel. I admire her dedication to portraying black men in a loving way, especially given how many good black men are misrepresented by society. This is one of several topics related to race and the politics of representation that I would like to discuss in my work.