Bipolar Disorder Painting

The older I get, the more I want to explore, experience, create. As the late Maya Angelou stated, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.” This explains my insatiable appetite for adventure; through my travels and everyday lived experiences I have been inspired to create on an almost daily basis. In my works you will find an array of topics ranging from random thoughts triggered by my daily experiences to commentary on social and political events. Sometimes visual expression becomes necessary when words aren’t loud enough. I remember writing my first comic book when I was about 4 or 5; I had a pretty extensive vocabulary for a toddler (not as many expletives then). The comic books turned into anime characters when I was a pre-teen that I sold to classmates for $1 (decent money in the ’90s). I was hustling quite a bit back then as money wasn’t the easiest to come by. I was born in Jamaica Hospital, Queens, NY to Jamaican immigrants living in Brooklyn. My mother, the most beautiful person in the world, worked at Hertz car rental and my dad, I was told he worked in “construction” but based on the loaded guns and Hefty bags filled with cash I think it’s safe to assume he was probably a banker or something. I’m kidding, he definitely sold drugs. A lot of it. I wish I could say that my childhood was innocent, however, it was far from that, but this is no tragedy. In addition to infidelity resulting in many siblings that I do not have a relationship with, my father was very abusive to my mother as well as myself and my older brother. There were many incidents that I hate to relive but it was short lived. When I was 8, my father was murdered on New Years Day in 1998. My work has always been tied to my emotional volatility; struggling with the death of my mom and the challenges of navigating the world independently has escalated to moments of intense sadness, frustration, and sometimes mania. I would see and feel things, letting those emotions unload on paper or canvas. It took some time before I could experience joy; even now, as a happy, well-adjusted 30-something year old I find that I need to release now and then. My first showing of personal pieces occurred during the pandemic and the height of the Black Lives Matter movement – a dark time for everyone.