Artist Statement

 

How do you cope with being unwanted by your own mother? With racist taunts from white peers? With the shame of being entered 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. 

 

Physical disability also 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 grief – not only for my former able-bodiedness, but for the countless missed classes and poetry readings and orchestra concerts and dining hall dinner gatherings. So tantalizing, so out of reach. My body, and the bodies of so many, are scarred by interpersonal brutality, structural oppression, and countless other assaults on our individual and collective spirits. 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.

 

Thus, I make art that fills me with delight. Art that reminds me of the wholeness and love that suffuse my life, that cradle my soul despite my hurting flesh. Debilitating pain and fatigue are abhorred but steadfast companions, returning dependably each day like the rising sun. But when I sit at my easel conjuring colorful compositions bursting with levity, I can endure.

 

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 the people, places, and memories I love, harnessing the slow, laborious process of painting to dwell inside these ephemeral moments, to elongate their lifespans. Honoring an image with close attention, then translating it into the language of brushwork and pigment, serves as a reverent act of care.

 

To me, painting serves as a practice of intimacy and attunement, a willingness to approach the world with stillness and wonder, an opportunity to bask in life-giving gratitude. I meticulously render the details of each scene in order to bestow profundity upon the seemingly trivial, unveil splendor in the everyday, draw on past joy to combat present suffering – and thereby, survive.