The Grande Damn Painting

I was about 7 years old when strong images became real in my mind. My mother bought me drawing paper and watercolors and encouraged me to draw on paper what was in my minds eye. What became clearer and clearer to me was the images depicting the complexity of my own background. It's been my life's quest to artistically explore those haunting images and the stories behind them. From the time that I can remember, I've been aware of a world outside of my current existence, a world that drives me to paint on canvas those images that haunt me of my own ancestral heritage. Without a verbal or written family background, I knew that both sides of my family were of racially mixed heritage. My mother's family came from Georgia and was comprised of Siouian Native American, African, English and Scotch bloodlines. They of course only recognized and were recognized by the One Drop Law, also known as hypo-descent, dating back to the 1662 Virginia law on the treatment of mixed-race individuals. My father's family lived in Bolton, North Carolina and it was there when I was 11 years old that my long intense history of racial blood mixing in the Antebellum South was validated. My grandmother's family was“Free Issue”from the early 1700's and was all racially mixed throughout the generations. The family race is what's called Tri-Racial. My great, great, great grandfather is General Thomas Brown and my great, great grandfather is Captain Will Henry Brown, all confederates, all White. My dreams and visions act like a spirit box in which I have a continuous dialog with the people who made me, and that dialog gets communicated in my paintings. My recent work has so far unearthed family mysteries. My work has also motivated me to look for and find a missing uncle who passed for white and had been lost to the family for over 40 years. That finding resulted in a book that I self published and distributed especially to the elders of my family. To say the least, the south has my history. Painting is a threshold for me to expand on my visions. Painting my visions and seeing the reaction to my work via the viewer, excites me and validates my research in my thesis of racial blood mixing in the Antebellum South, which created race–my race. I will consult archives of generations of creoles and mixed race people as I continue my paintings and writings about my own family saga.