Artist statement

I make art because I am still becoming. Not as a romantic idea but as a lived, daily reality — the ongoing work of a person who has sat with the feeling of not being enough, of not being as far along as he should be, of carrying a sense of greatness inside that he has not yet fully learned to release. That tension — between who I am and who I know I am capable of being — is the engine behind everything I create.

My work is organized across three distinct series, each one rooted in a different dimension of that journey.

Uwezo takes its name from the Swahili word for potential — a word I discovered after the mark that would become the series had already been created. A single continuous looping line of varying thickness, drawn with no intention other than to make something curvilinear, became the visual foundation of an entire body of work. The name found the mark rather than the other way around. Uwezo for me means that all things are possible — not as a slogan but as a conviction shaped by my study of the Word of God, neuroscience, and quantum physics. These disciplines converge on the same truth from different directions: that what we believe about ourselves at the deepest level shapes what we are capable of becoming. I paint this series for myself and for everyone who has ever felt behind, overlooked, or uncertain of their own capacity — because the potential was never absent. It was always waiting to be worked.

Racines — the French word for roots — draws from the two places that made me before I understood I was being made. My Louisiana Creole heritage, rooted in New Orleans, carries within it the particular complexity of a culture forged from African, French, Caribbean, and American Southern influences — a culture that knows how to hold grief and joy in the same breath, that invented the Second Line, that built something extraordinary from the most difficult of conditions. Alongside that inherited world sits the lived one — growing up and coming of age in Berkeley and Oakland, California, two cities that shaped my sense of identity, justice, and possibility in ways I am still uncovering. The Racines series does not document these worlds. It expresses how they felt — and feel still. The work is primarily abstract, though realism may surface when a memory demands it.

Thank You begins with an honest premise — that gratitude is not only a mood or a lifestyle but a practice forged under pressure. These paintings are not about gratitude in its comfortable form. They are about the moment it arrives in its most difficult and most powerful form — in the middle of fear, in the gap between expectation and reality, in the exhale that comes when the weight finally shifts. Each work is built on a dark ground. Warm metallics and creams move through that darkness not to cover it but to emerge from it — the way real thankfulness does. The series is primarily abstract, but will include the human figure and facial expression when the emotion requires a face to carry it fully.

Together, these three bodies of work form a single ongoing conversation about what it means to be human — rooted in where you come from, reaching toward what you are capable of, and grateful, always, for the distance already traveled.