Visual Diary of Lived Experience

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Creating art has given me a sense of comfort and identity since an early age; it’s how I process the world around me. The people, places and events that profoundly affect me are what fuel my work. My desire as an artist is to fully explore and express my emotions related to these influences, rather than simply illustrate them. 

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When I was 7 years old, I asked my father to draw a picture of a horse. What he created looked like a badly drawn box on stilts. I told him it didn’t look like a horse to me, and he responded by encouraging me to find a picture of a horse I liked and then draw it until I was happy with it. That’s exactly what I did, over, and over, and over again. This simple interaction with my father is what sparked my lifelong interest in creativity; in essence he gave me my first drawing assignment. From that point on I drew as much as possible each day. After horses I began drawing sports figures, then hot rod cars, and then characters from comic books. Throughout my youth I drew as frequently as I could about the things that interested me most. 

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By the time I reached my late teens I’d become distracted by the pursuits of young adulthood, and I stopped creating altogether. After graduating high school, and a short stint in Junior College, I spent the next five years doing various corporate jobs in and around Atlanta. In 1996, I began feeling a desire to return to my creative roots, so I enrolled at the Art Institute of Atlanta. I worked full time while I studied, but dropped out after two quarters to take a job in the financial printing industry in Tampa, Florida. I lived there three and a half years before moving to the Bay Area in the year 2000 for a job in Palo Alto. I continued working in financial printing for another year, which helped to further solidify my desire to leave my corporate existence for a more fulfilling life. Then one afternoon in late spring of 2001, I found myself in a meeting with my boss and the human resources manager. Their message was simple and to the point, the “Dot Com” bubble was starting to bust, and the company was cutting back. I was offered a choice of taking a $20,000 cut in salary and keeping my job, or being laid off with two weeks severance. They gave me 24 hours to decide. 

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The decision was a no brainer for me. I’d become increasingly dissatisfied with working 9 to 5 in corporate America, and I wasn’t about to continue doing it for $20K less. By this point I had a strong desire to live my life differently. I wanted to do something that would allow me to explore and use my creativity. I returned to work the following day and said no thanks to the pay cut. 

At that moment I made a life-altering decision to leave a comfortable yet unfulfilling corporate job and pursue my dream of becoming a full-time artist. I had no idea how or if this would come to pass. Instead of focusing on the how, I sat down with my journal and wrote out my heart's desire for the kind of artist I wanted to become. 

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Then I began to paint every day, without fail, over, and over, and over again. I approached this new chapter of life with the same curiosity and excitement I had as a seven-year-old boy when I started drawing. Over the past 22 years I’ve maintained that deep curiosity about life and artistic expression, and I’ve continued to practice my craft while exploring different mediums. The result is a body of work that is a visual diary of my lived experience as an African American man in the United States of America. These experiences are illustrated in various styles from cubist, to abstract expression, to collage—all artistic expressions of the various people, places, and events that have profoundly affected me.

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My current body of work was influenced by the murder of Michael Brown and the civil unrest that followed in Ferguson, Missouri in August 2014. These events had an enormous impact on me emotionally and artistically. For the past eight years my work has been focused on issues of social justice, specifically examining themes of police violence and the doctrine of white supremacy in the United States. Currently I combine aspects of photo collage with painting and traditional collage to create mixed media works on wood panel. Each work presents an alternative narrative to the status quo by using text, juxtaposition, and mid-20th century advertising imagery. My intention is to engage and inspire my audience while throwing a “glitch” into their perception. 

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We are living in an unprecedented time of social change and the evolution of humanity. The circumstances we find ourselves in here in the United States provide fertile ground for the collective conscious to reimagine a more just and equitable society.  I believe that my art can be a way to help facilitate that change.