Ernest Shaw

Region: South

Website: http://www.eshawart.com

City / State: Baltimore, MD

 Being an image maker affords me the opportunity to highlight the humanity of the viewer by illustrating the humanity of the subject. My creative process focuses on the interaction between the work and its audience. My goal is for the receiver to experience the mystery of creation while interacting with the portrait. The work’s evolution to becoming art has everything to do with the dance between the painting and the receiver.

My primary subjects reflect the multiple aspects of the Black/Africanist experience in the context of a society that confines Blackness to being the antithesis to whiteness and a response to racialized subjugation. Authentic portrayals of the Black body are of particular interest to me simply because there is no other subject I find to be as complex, misrepresented, and misunderstood.