This work began as an inquisitive journey into my own identity as a black American. I asked myself who would I be and how would I view myself if all the information that I was inculcated with about being black was given to me without the negative connotations so inextricably entwined within the history of our nation. Ultimately I recognize that the transformation of the meaning of “black,” given its various connotations and what it means to be described as such in America, is a constantly changing thing.

Intrigued by the people and landscapes of Savannah and coastal Georgia, I paint daily in my studio in Vernonburg. My work is fueled by my romance with the act of painting, and inspired by my surroundings and the rich history and tradition of the Deep South.

By painting and drawing these subjects, I hope to preserve, catalog, and celebrate the terrain of daily life.

A simple idea of cutting, editing, layering, and slowing down. (paraphrased from a quotation by composer Eliane Radigue)

My recent work addresses both a personal and cultural proclivity towards the end of time. The images depicted are like hallucinogenic visions forecasting some impending cataclysm. They have all the customary objects in them, the mundane places that were once so familiar and quieting, still something is amiss. The worlds are ridden with structures synonymous with humans, and others that are not, yet all are empty. Filling the void is another, more ominous presence.

My paintings combine elements of graffiti, textile patterns, botanical illustrations, tattoos, and Eastern religions. These are the elements I place within my kaleidoscopic chamber, where they converge to form a symmetrical matrix.

Chaos and structure have long been a common thread in the fabric of my work. My recent series of works employ circles and rings as rigid forms, using color, size, and placement to achieve a theme such as a landscape or a map. The background texture suggests halted movement as though each element were suspended in time. The chaos and structure of each painting form a perfect continuity.

“Driving is a spectacular form of amnesia. Everything is to be discovered, everything to be obliterated.” —Jean Baudrillard, “Vanishing Point,” America (1986)

My paintings are hybrids distilling life experience and observation with visual culture. Two strands unite most of my work: animal imagery and the influence of medieval bestiaries. To make order and sense of the natural world, medieval scholars compiled bestiaries that intertwined folk tales and legends with fantasy, classical writings, and direct behavioral observation. The result was an artful, imaginative distillation. Those texts prompted me to reconsider the need to make contemporary art rooted solely in the here and now.

A constant element of my work has been the significance of process, repetition, and time. In works comprised of paper scrolls, I mark individual strips of paper with handwritten and printed Farsi (Persian language) text. Each strip is then tightly rolled to create a core, around which successive strips are added. Repeated in the work is the word for love, or “eshghe. ” The repetition of this particular word is a recurring element in much of my work of the last decade.

The inter-penetrating layers of symbolism, mysticism, and narrative in my work constitute a timeless world of ancient rituals and divinatory rites. In synthesizing techniques of the old masters, ancient mystical teachings, and contemporary science, my work focuses on the uniqueness and universality of inner landscapes and transcendent experience.