How do you cope with being unwanted by your own mother? With racist taunts from white peers? With the shame of being invaded with neither permission nor protest? With panic attacks and eating disorders and soul-crushing depression?

 

For years, my art was rooted in trauma. Sublimating pain into paint, I visually conjured the demons I battled. My compositions were dominated by dark color palettes, screaming faces, tendrilled monstrosities. Inevitably, reviving my haunting specters took an emotional toll. What began as cathartic became arduous and excruciating – like each time I put brush to canvas, I was carving into my own skin. 

 

Disability now deeply shapes my practice. Since becoming acquainted with chronic illness, I have been relearning how to navigate this fallible vessel. It is a process riddled with mourning – not only for my former abled self, but for the countless missed classes and brunch outings and poetry readings and orchestra concerts. Forever tantalizing, forever out of reach.

 

So many of our spirits are wounded by structural and interpersonal brutality, scarred by catastrophe and grief. I choose to respond with unapologetic joy, a tenacious insistence upon the right to flourish. Joy is what galvanizes us to fight and go on, what opens our imaginations to new tomorrows, what binds us together.

 

With my paintings, I seek to leave viewers with a smile dancing upon their lips, a warmth suffusing their chest. Beneath strokes of vibrant oil paint, I allow the radiant orange tones of my underpaintings to shine through, permeating each piece with an aura of ecstatic warmth. I depict my beloved people, places, and memories – images that evoke both nostalgic yearning and bubbling giggles. A visual constellation coalescing into home.

 

I harness the slow, laborious process of painting to dwell inside these ephemeral moments, to elongate their lifespans. Painting serves as a practice of intimacy and attunement, a willingness to approach the world with stillness and wonder, an act of reverent care. I meticulously render the details of each scene in order to bestow profundity upon the seemingly trivial, unveil splendor in the everyday. With subtle color modulations in each brushstroke, my paintings beckon the viewer to engage their close attention, too.

 

Thus, I make art that fills me with delight. Art that reminds me of the wholeness and love that suffuse my life, that cradles my soul despite my hurting flesh. Debilitating pain and fatigue are despised but dependable companions, returning reliably each day like the rising sun. But when I sit at my easel conjuring colorful compositions bursting with levity, drawing upon joy of the past to assuage suffering of the present, I can endure.