Roots

Some roots run deep into the earth of a specific place.  Others run through the blood - inherited before they are understood, carried before they are named.  Roots is both.

This series begins where identity begins - not with a single origin but with the layered, complex, sometimes contradictory rootedness of a life shaped by more than one world.  The Louisiana Creole heritage that lives in the blood - French, African, Caribbean, American South - its language, its light, its particular way of holding both joy and sorrow in the same breath.  And the streets of Berkeley, California, where that inherited identity met a city of its own complexity - intellectual, activist, multicultural, restless - and was shaped by it in ways that took decades to fully understand. 

These paintings do not document those worlds. They express how they felt.  The quality of light remembered rather than photographed.  The emotional wealth of belonging and not belonging simultaneously.  The texture of ta culture carried in the body before it is carried in the mind.  The specific feeling of growing up at the intersection of ancestral heritage and lived American experience - neither fully one thing nor the other, and richer for it. 

Roots is painted from that intersection.  From the bayou and the Bay.  From the French tongue and the California sun.  From everything that was inherited and everything that was lived, held together in color, texture, and form the way roots hold soil - not by force, but by nature.