The purpose of art to me is not about the different materials and techniques that an artist uses to create, but more about why? The artist chooses that specific image or object to be the subject of their creation. When observing art, I’m attracted to the color schemes, patterns, and size. These observations allow me to want to know more about the artist’s life and endeavors.
During the creative process of my own work, I’m inspired by things from my surroundings, such as clothing, patterns, colors, shapes, facial expressions, hair and the human figure. I’ve started a series of paintings called Urban Lines, which are scribbles of color to create the human form. These figures are painted with complementary colors along with brown, to depict the African American decent. These figures could be of any ethnicity, but I’ve chosen to make them of African American decent because they tell a story of my life.
They symbolize everyday life of being young and black dealing with real life problems such as drugs, alcohol, sex, poverty, relationships, and self-esteem issues. I’m generally a quite individual and in the past struggled to express my feelings and concerns about my environment. Painting these figures allow me to have more of a voice of what I see and experience from my own surroundings. These series of paintings all have an abstract background; the background symbolizes a brick wall. It stands for poverty, public housing, murder, community, life, drugs and construction.
I feel as though the architecture of buildings and houses in a community conflicts with a person’s views about that area or place. People associate bad neighborhoods with broken up buildings, crime, graffiti, drug activity, and low-income housing. The figures I use throughout my paintings are made up characters. I scratch out the eyes, because their identity isn’t important, only their appearance. The eyes tell a lot about a person’s character, but how often is someone judged by their eyes? Police use a description of clothing when in search for suspects, people choose friends for their unique personalities or popularity status, and even during intimate moments the focus is on how it feels, instead of looking that person in the eye to embrace their presence. These figures symbolize the various kinds of people that may live in a classified bad community.