My recent body of work attempts to answer a question I’ve been asking myself for a long time: How specific a story do I want to tell?

 I seek to create work that is continuously looking forward. I use abstract forms and brushwork, juxtaposed with refined figures and structures that emerge through the encased space as if they were jumping out at you. These techniques are utilized to create the feel of anticipation for the viewer. I want them to feel as if they are sitting on the brink of something big and something new. I also use African American males as the main subject for each work. This comes from a desire to see Black men represented better in society and the arts, in a more positive light.

 I am interested in the visual and communicative potential of objects that are cast off, discarded, and overlooked. Inherent to still life is an engagement with the mundane and domestic, as well as the notion of an arrested visual experience. These subjects, their intrinsic intimacy, and the process of working from life are rich with pictorial and conceptual possibilities.

 The North American landscape and respective lifestyle is the foundation for my investigation of domestic space, land use, identity, and consumerism. I question the cultural obsession with the “dream home” and the underlying normativity present in these everyday spaces, asking if individualism exists in prefabricated choices.

 An heirloom rocking chair in need of restoration was my inspiration to learn to cane, which evolved into an ongoing series of paintings and mixed media works investigating the forms and textures of chairs and interior spaces. Drawers and boxes in my studio overflow with scraps collected for the past twenty years—treasured family photos, heirloom embroidery, pieces of chair upholstery, vintage drawer liners, richly colored and textured textiles, stacks of children’s drawings—bits and pieces of stories and nostalgia, a collection of a lifetime.

 Recently I have been painting bodies and hands. And these questions keep coming up: How does a painting function as a surrogate for a body? Can a painting reach a level of intimacy and touch, as bodies can? And can imagery that toggles between states of visibility speak to those who are themselves caught between two worlds?

 My work involves overlapping combinations of media. Photo transfer and paint are combined with clay, and photographs are transferred, screenprinted, or collaged into paintings. I welcome the expressive possibilities of not limiting myself to a single medium. As well, I work loosely to encourage unplanned, intuitive outcomes. Nature for me is a frequent source of imagery, lessons, and metaphors. A recurrent theme in my work is the memento mori.

 My current work explores my life experiences as contained in objects collected, moments remembered in form, and shapes organized onto the painting surface. Currently, my practice looks like anthropological dig meets cabinet of curiosities. I draw from objects in my home—pots made by friends, a handful of sand I collected while visiting my sister in Kuwait, a cast of my dad’s teeth, my grandmother’s seashell collection from years spent in the Philippines.

 I interpose objects of the everyday to distort our sense of space, explore our ability to inhabit rooms, and merge the dreamlike with the rigid. I think of paintings as they exist in the home, decorating our lives, using us to give them purpose. And inversely, objects become weirdly functional paintings to question abstraction and reality. My work focuses on the acute and the polite, the domestic and the utilitarian.

 I am an oil painter who creates elaborately detailed paintings of contemporary vanitas. My newest works consider vanitas in a modern context, reflecting on the COVID-19 pandemic. In a traditional sense, vanitas alludes to themes of plague, desperation, dehumanization, and loss. Although I have previously looked in this direction for inspiration, these historical paintings of the fleeting world feel more immediate to me than ever. I now see them as compassionate pictures rather than merely ones of dark, glittering glamour.