The Beauty. The Tragedy. The Obsession.

January 12th, 2010, Haiti.  No one can know the numbers.  It's impossible to count.  it's useless to try.  Those of us who were there and survived what so many did not, we know how many we lost personally, but as a human race, we will never know how many of our brothers and sisters disappeared on that day in Haiti.

Obviously, to deal with this reality, I've turned to my art as my therapy to help clear my head and try to understand life.  It's been my Statistics series, once again, that I have been working on the most since that day.  However, the truth is that I've been working on these paintings primarily because they are what has been selling well, and as much as anything right now, I need to create things that are going to be able to raise funds to contribute to the recovery effort.  I really haven't spent much time pondering their new context or trying to redefine them at all in reference to this new tragedy that has so heavily redefined my life.  To me, I was just continuing a concept that existed before January 12th, but still held true, although maybe not directly related to the earthquake.  As I've been working on the small portraits, however, I've now been doing them in the company of other artists who have brought new eyes to what my work might mean.

I recently began working in a new studio in Mizak along with a couple of my past students and good friends.  It is a beautiful and peaceful place to paint, but it is also located in an active part of the community so we frequently have visitors pass by to see what these crazy artists are up to.  One day last week I had about ten of my Statistics paintings sitting out on a wooden bench next to where I was working when one man came in and greeted us.  When he came by and looked at my paintings sitting there he said, in a general manner to everybody in the place, "It looks like this is a workshop to create people."  Without even looking up from his own canvas, my friend Astrel responded, "Yeah, we're replacing those that we lost several weeks ago."

This statement gave me a whole new perspective on what these paintings mean to me, and could mean for others now.  I've called the series "Statistics," but there were more arbitrary statistics and indefinite estimates thrown around on the days following the earthquake than ever before.  Statistics that were meant to directly represent the same people and population that my paintings are meant to represent.  So many numbers were pulled out of thin air in those days and stuck to a vague concept of so many people that died in anonymity and then were buried in mass graves and burned in undignified piles.  These are exactly the people that a series of paintings like this was meant to give faces to, to show their individual beauty as human beings and make them something more than just bodies or victims.  So now, thinking of these paintings as a way to "replace those that we lost" makes the work even more personal. 

Even though the death tolls are still, and always will be, complete guesses in the dark, I know that I will never be able to replace them all with my little paintings, but whatever I can create will serve as a tribute and a memory.  So much destruction, creation is the only anecdote.

This is the transcript of a gallery talk that I gave at a recent exhibition.

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I've titled this show “Life Defined,” because life is something that's never easy to define, but for myself, I use my art to define it.  Through my life experiences as I have traveled in Africa, lived in Mali, and currently am living and working in rural Haiti, I've encountered a lot of things that are very difficult to understand or explain initially, but as I take the emotions from those experiences and begin to put them into paint, they start to make more sense to me.  As humans we try to define it as best as we can through words and language and labels, but those always remain inadequate in truly describing the existence that we go through every day. So, for me, I always find that it's when I'm in the studio with that brush in my hand, interacting with the canvas, that I'm able to begin to discover what life means. When I'm walking around my community in Haiti, and I meet someone in the road and greet them, “Good morning, what's going on?” A very common response from the Haitians is “Well, I'm here, just searching for life.” My art represents my journey searching for that same thing, life and what it means.

 But how do you define it? Are you a glass half full or glass half empty kind of person? Myself, I've recently been accused of being naïve because I so often tend to focus on the good rather than the bad. But when it comes to my art, I always feel that it is necessary to express the truth, no matter what it is. Whether it's good or bad, uplifting or tragic, beautiful or ugly, whatever I find as reality, that is what I want to come through in my art. So as to not allow viewers to pass by in ignorance, but also not allow them to walk away completely depressed, I try to always create a balance between all those opposing forces that do define our lives on this earth. A balance between all of the beauty and all of the tragedy. Because yes there is war and famine and disease, but there is also soccer, and music, and splashing in the waves. I have actually been really looking forward to the unique opportunity that this show was offering me with two separate rooms to spread the exhibition between. I've hopefully been able to show both of those sides to my art this way but also show how they interact and relate to each other. In the other room, those are mostly my older pieces that are mostly inspired from my experiences in Africa and they tend to depict more of the suffering and despair. But in this room is more of my recent work that has been created in the last couple years since I have been living in Haiti, and through this work I have really seen my personal definition of life begin to transform. I don't choose to focus so much on the huge grand concepts of poverty and injustice but rather, my own life has found more significance in being defined through the individual faces of people that have had an impact on me and through the small subtle moments of pleasure.

It is those individuals that inspire me to make the art that I do. They have taught me a great deal through that daily searching for life in so many ways. Through their struggles and their triumphs and their simple moments of being who they are, beautiful creations worthy of attention.They have shown me so many things that I am compelled to communicate, some grand, others seemingly insignificant. But it is only in our interpretations that we can find significance, so I encourage you as you look at the art tonight, to not try to separate everything into black and white. As I have displayed my art in other places, I have found that people usually have one of two reactions to it. They either act like they feel obligated to be sad towards the despair of poverty or they just tend to gloss over all of the truth and say, “oh aren't those people lovely.” But really, the point of my art is that it doesn't have to be one or the other. So, this evening, as difficult as it may seem, I want you all to just remove the idea of poverty from your mind and react to the images for what they are, compositions of form and color. Respond to the people in those images for what they are, humans that may not be that different from you, and in every painting that you look at, search for some voice speaking to you personally through it.

So if someone asked me, “Glass half full or half empty?” I would probably answer, “It's half empty, but there's more milk in the fridge.” Yeah, things may be tough, but there's always hope. There's always potential for change, for growth. There's always the opportunity to create a different tomorrow. And, if we choose to invest in that which is beautiful, and see the beauty through the tragedy, then, ultimately, what is good and beautiful will prevail over what is tragic and ugly.

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After the talk, I spoke individually with some of the people there as they continued to look at the work on display. There were two professors from the Simpson art department, a man and a woman, who were both standing, enamored, with one of my paintings entitled, "Destiny".  It's a piece that, as I've shown it extensively in other shows, it rarely attracts much attention, but these two seemed to be very intrigued and were discussing it with each other. As I approached them, the woman turned to me, gently shaking her head, and said, "I just love it." The man began pointing out the compositional elements that were so successful in it, particularly the way that the bars intersect directly over the eyes creating anonymity, and the way that the shadows gently fall back across the figures creating movement in contrast to the rigid stiffness of the grid created by the prison bars. Then the womanc ommented on the effectiveness of the color palette as there is really only one object in the image of color, the red cloth over the one boy's head, yet the purples and reds from the cloth are picked up in absolutely every other part of the painting from the white shirt, to the gray metal bars, to the brown flesh tones, to the dark black background. "It makes a feeling that is very warm and inviting in a situation that is obviously cold and harsh."

"I just wanna grab those bars and free them!" The man said. And that's when I new that I had accomplished my goal, not just with this painting, but with the show in general. Because rather than allowing a preconceived notion of the meaning of poverty to steer their interpretation of the art from the time they stepped into the gallery, they allowed the design elements within the work to generate anauthentic and sincere response. They went from seeing lines and colors to recognizing an overwhelming desire for liberation. It wasn't just a detached sympathy towards a misunderstood situation. It's the kind of response that most people aren't willing to give in to with my art but when they do, it means so much more. It makes the art more than those cliche photos of starving children on NGO's brochures and also something different than all the abstract compositions cluttering up the white walls of today's art world. And that's why I make my art.