Maua Ya Chuma II Painting

My work is a series of allegories that simultaneously reveal its overt messages and hidden meanings that challenge notions about the collective journeys of all people but those of the African diaspora in particular. I paint these collective and often historical allegories, both affirmed and disputed, giving them a framework to challenge the struggles of identity, power and self actualization. My subjects are in classical pictorial representations using delineations of factual chronicles and imagined mythology replete with persuasive imagery that defies the common visual library and the often polemic misrepresentations of people of color. I use contrasting narratives with symbolism hidden in plain view that feeds discourse in an attempt to shed light on the weaponization of race and it's hypocritical progeny. These illustrated and often wordless stories use stark uncompromising realism as a catalyst for eroding the conventionally assigned racial archetypes. As a result of varying degrees of subtlety in the hidden and not so hidden symbolism in each artwork, a web of truths are revealed in the fabric of our historic racial synecdoche by actually creating initial allegories in the minds of the viewers that often change and evolve with subsequent views. The stories I paint range from historical to mythological to anecdotal and beyond. Recently I have been creating imagery that reveals psychological journeys that are often metaphysical. In a quest to reaffirm the higher self in what is often a panoply in paint, I seek to reveal positive remonstrations to the notions of historic brutality, self loathing and the mass psychogenesis of societal apathy. My endeavor is to imbue the allegories with symbols of forgiveness, love and compassion in a visual balance to the darker counterparts using archaic and modern symbols, composition and even tropes that I can only hope communicates a message of personal apotheosis amid a world that can sometimes be a miasma of proffered fears.