In the past several years I have embodied a particular moment in time, sourced from media imagery of outrage and protest. I am sensitive as well as an observer of African-American portrayal by a white-centric media. My observations coupled with my studies within my community, I’m driven to create a distinctive figure poised between portraiture and social commentary. My figures are often solitary and distorted. They speak to being disenfranchised or homeless, as being barely visible.
At times, the faces of my esthetics are formally powerful, beautiful, and charged with a spark of empathic intensity that which commands my audience’s attention. The portraits of African-American men in my view exist in a singular world—human and ancestral, living and sculpted—with an immediacy and economy. I use lines often found in contemporary graphics, working in tandem with gray and black washes, suggesting ancient stone. Spots of color can take one back to the current moment—the red and green of black empowerment, that represent the African American Colors created by Marcus Garvey, which give a race of people dignity, who have been denied their identity for centuries.
