When we humans experience aesthetic pleasure, we experience joy, and joy is the ecstasy of living. When humans do any activity that creates aesthetic pleasure, I understand this process and its outcomes to be art. My art is making painting, cooking, growing plants, nurturing relationships, and exchanging jokes and stories with people that I adore. This artistic statement begins in a rather autobiographical and self-ethnographical kind of way. I find it extremely difficult to separate my life from my art. In fact, as evidenced by my paintings, my life is my art.

Currently, I'm making playful, ironic, vivid, narrative, representational, mixed-media paintings on hard surfaces such as wood panels. I enjoy using wood because it's natural and alive, and because a hard surface better supports the drawing that I'm bringing into my work. The more that I draw, the more I realize that the caricature and portraiture that I did while working at Busch Gardens as a teenager, is coming back to me. Conceptually, I find this interesting because of my tendency to be attracted to vernacular, popular, and folk art forms. I use this kind of visual language because I'm attracted to it, and because it allows me to communicate stories to a broad audience.

In my most recent art, the kind of stories that I paint are often personal experience narratives. These are anecdotal, testimonials that I encounter while Signifyin' in my daily life. By Signifyin', I mean the ways of discovering, showing, and creating meaning that are distinctively African-American, (while not necessarily being exclusive to African-Americans). By Signifyin', I mostly mean that I listen to people, watch people, listen to songs, read books, watch the news, and experience life. In great abundance, while doing these basic things, I find great subjects for making art.

The daily life personal experience narratives that I find most fascinating may be any combination of funny, tragic, and poignant , simultaneously containing layered themes on topics such as race, prejudice, gender, sexuality, culture, and class. Usually, it is within these "small" daily life conversations, that I find unique, compelling, sophisticated ideas. I pick the stories that I turn into paintings based on my perception of the rarity or importance of the story, and the story's potential to stimulate multiple entrance points for the extensive discussion of issues. This I perceive as the story's Signifyin' power. For me, these stories are most powerful when they are at once, personal and political, personal and critical, and public while being private.

Another important aspect of my artmaking process lies in the oral act of storytelling. The majority of my paintings were made because I felt the stories speak to me.These stories often stroke my imagination because they contain strong imagery that makes them burn and so I think of them often. These are usually stories that others have told me, or that I've told others. I "collect" these stories in my mental story bank, and relive them by performing them orally and visually. In this way, I see myself as an oral historian, an urban folklorist, a documentarian, an interviewer, a storyteller, and a griot all at once. By making paintings about stories that have been spoken, I privilege orality and attempt to trace and capture its preciousness as it moves through the universe with its power to influence, and transform all in its path.

Put another way, I like to make art that tells stories with grand, counternarrative characteristics. By grand, I mean stories that illustrate my takes on the African-American experience of the African-American collective. By counternarrative, I mean unique stories that counter one-dimensional stereotypes, and offer an "alternative" view about people who have been traditionally marginalized by the hegemony in American popular culture.

To take the idea of Signifyin' a step further, I must mention that I while my influences are eclectic and the outcome of my approach is idiosyncratic, I do attempt to walk in the aesthetic footsteps of particular creative individuals. Zora Neale Hurston, Anna Deveare Smith, Jacob Lawrence, Faith Ringgold, and Carrie Mae Weems, are artists whom I admire for how they have collected folklore and placed it at the center of their intellectual, spiritual, and creative concerns. I aspire to do this-- to reach deep into folklore, and pull out invaluable cultural material that says something ecstatic about this experience of being human. Although a story -- a life may only last a moment, I seek to bear witness and testify about that which may be deeply felt and understood by generations to come.