My paintings draw breath, alive with the origins they carry within.
They rise from earth older than my hands or name, earth that holds memory, labor, loss, and survival. That earth is not left behind; it pulses within the work.
I was born in Ellaville, Georgia, where red clay holds what it has seen. I was formed in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn NY, where rhythm moves through the street and everything it touches.
I was shaped in St. Croix, where the sea carries history, and the wind moves memory from place to place.
These places are not mere references; they inhabit the color, the surface, and every mark I lay down.
I remember a porch bathed in kerosene light, its gentle glow holding quiet strength. My aunts and uncles gathered, not to flee the day, but to turn it in their hands and shape it anew. There was laughter, testimony, and song. Gospel and rhythm and blues were more than music; they taught us how to endure, how to bend without breaking, how to find our voices when silence seemed safer.
Those nights linger within me. They resurface in my work—in deep indigo, in brown, in surfaces layered and broken open. They emerge in figures leaning close, in rhythm, in repetition, in interruption, and in return.
And then there is St. Croix.
In St. Croix, the light stretches wide. The air tastes of salt. The sea cradles all that has crossed: passage, arrival, loss, survival. Before dawn, I sense the work before I see it. The wind drifts through the studio like a familiar voice, reminding me that memory is here, waiting to be held, to build my paintings as memory arrives: layered, erased, revealed. Nothing is fixed. Everything moves forward. Each surface preserves what endorses.
My work is not meant to be glanced at and forgotten.
It is meant to live. To live with my work is to enter into a relationship with memory, with history, with a continuity that does not stop at the edge of the canvas. To collect is not to possess, but to bear witness and to safeguard what the painting carries. The story endures only through attention and presence. It asks not just to be seen, but to be held for what it brings forward, continuing to speak and resonate over time.