The Urgency of Now Painting

I paint people in oil and watercolor and look inside of what appears to be seen. The common thread in my work is humanity and unlike the lens of a camera that objectively documents a moment in time and space, my lens subjectively observes and comments. My portraits and narrative paintings converge the real and imagined to examine the status quo and social norms of modern life. I invite viewers to consider the psychological, sociological, or emotional complexities of race, gender, age, and culture. I often incorporate text into paintings. My master’s degree in reading education and the thirty years of reading aloud to children and being read to by children from storybooks where picture and text go hand-in-hand have influenced this creative choice. I use lettering from magazines and newspapers for the text, much like the ransom notes written by the kidnappers on the TV detective shows I watched as a kid. I am drawn to the various colors, sizes, and fonts of the cutout letters and how they enhance the visual impact of the overall painting and provide context, allowing the viewer to connect emotionally and intellectually. I attribute my artistic style to the hundreds of young children I knew in my 30 years as a teacher. The daily interactions with children and most importantly, the moment-by-moment immersion into their concrete thinking rests on my canvases via simple lines, shapes, values, and textures in vivid colors set into a story. Since 2012, my work has been in numerous exhibitions in Georgia, the Southeast, the Midwest, and New York City. In the summer of 2021, I had my first major solo exhibition entitled, TOO: An Orientation of Spirit, at the Oconee County Arts Foundation in Watkinsville, GA. Later that year, the NYC Phoenix Art Collective in New York City invited me to present this same exhibition virtually on their website. On October 20, 2022, Athens Clarke County’s Unified Government organization, Envision Athens, presented me with the CREATE Award for my body of work focusing on humanity. Several individual paintings have also earned awards. Larry Ossei-Mensah, as the juror of the Lyndon House 45th Annual Juried Exhibition (2020), presented the painting, Learning Without Wisdom is Like a Load of Books on a Donkey’s Back, a Merit Award.