Artist statement :

Like every other artist working today, I live in an age of new media that is dynamic and exciting. And yet my own traditional practice continues: I paint people and landscapes with oil and watercolor, because I want to capture the qualities of energetic stillness that I believe only a direct address of the figure can achieve.

I’m fascinated by the ways that a physical body can gesture toward, or even reveal, an entire life in paint. With every one of my subjects, I study the flesh and the eyes; the stature and the facial composure. And when I set these observations down onto canvases, my goal is always to realize an empathic object — after a months-long communion with reference images, I strive for every finished portrait to realize a sort of third rail of existence: the figure, paired with the materials, yields a newly revealed persona and world.

As a painter of color, it’s my desire to work within painting, and its art historical paradigm that, until recently, did not generally include non-white artists. While my ultimate and most enduring interests lie in the universal qualities of contemporary life, it’s a kind of urgent honor to render the faces of people not always considered relevant to the history of portraiture. I’m inspired to be a Black artist in a diverse world, working within one of the most ancient traditions in the history of art.

Most recently, I’ve been experimenting with collaged reference images to break up conventional pictorial space. As a painter, I love color and tone and mood and suggestion, and the best paintings should always embody more mystery than they do prescriptive clarity. To that end, my recent large scale paintings aim to create new space for idealized memory and symbolic elements. These paintings are intended to be elemental studies of what abides and remains, the most essential remnants of the human experience.