ARTIST STATEMENT

Working at the intersections of abstraction, process, and materials, the surfaces of my paintings are not only made of paint.  There are materials laid in strata, evidencing a build-up -- like tension, like a dénouement, like one last hope or one last straw, or the exhilarating chorus of a song.  I’m a black abstractionist who doesn’t depict realistic figures, but I do portray an embodiment of sorts because I’m making these thick-skinned paintings that occupy space and bear the marks of labor. My techniques of collage are embodying a certain wholeness out of fracture. By making abstract works overall, I’m beaconing the viewer to slow down and take a longer look.  I’m attempting to stimulate the viewer’s capacity for emotional sensitivity and critical thinking using the compassionate possibilities of art.

In the end, I’m thinking about my work as a jazzification of the formal, a claiming of space, a making of mark that is reflective of the cultural and social matrices that inform me.  I’m using the intuitive and evocative languages of abstraction alongside the poetic resonance of what something is made of, in order to point to, without literally depicting, the layered complexities surrounding identity, culture, and the improvisational strategies of the Black experience.  I like to infuse my works with historically significant materials. Black-eyed peas, coffee, cotton, sweet tea, and other such materials have found their way into my art.  And, although I embrace beauty and balance, I want my work to reverberate with the kind of radical beauty that bursts from the struggle and grit of lived experience.

And, while I consider myself to be a painter, I also make thingly objects that hang, stand, sit, lie down, or climb.