Artist Statement

I paint because abstraction is the only language I've found that's honest enough for the life I've actually lived. It doesn't ask me to flatten things into something comfortable or recognizable. It lets the color be loud. It lets the texture speak. It lets the viewer bring their own experience into the room and find something real waiting there.

I grew up going to museums. I took art seriously long before I made it seriously. That relationship — between a lifelong absorber of art and the moment you finally step to the other side of it — is in every painting I make.

I came up in New York City, via the Caribbean. I live now in the Midwest, in a studio, in my second year of making this my real practice. There is tension in that geography — between the city that formed me and the quiet that finally gave me room — and I don't try to resolve it. I paint it.

My work comes from cultural memory and everyday feeling, from the transnational experience of belonging everywhere and nowhere fully, from boredom and beauty and the specific desire to be free — from perfection, from expectation, from the beige. I work in acrylic and oil. I use color the way I've always understood it: boldly, intuitively, and in full conversation with what the painting is asking for.

I am early in this. I am honest about that. What I know is that the work is real, the color is mine, and the walls that hold these paintings will know it.