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I can’t remember a time in my life when I wasn’t struck with an intense focused energy that funneled out through my hands.
I began creating art before I could speak. I was practically born on a quaint lush island where
the crickets sang me to sleep at night and the ocean smell woke me in the morning.
I ate fruit from the trees and didn’t worry about wearing shoes most of the time. People spoke in song and danced in the sweaty heat. I didn’t realize that my mother and father didn’t look the same and that I didn’t look like any of the other people around me.
It wasn’t until I was about 11 when I finally distinguished that my mother is Chinese, my Father, Anglo, and almost everyone else in Port Antonio, Jamaica is Black. I moved to Miami and now have become an honorary Cuban; speaking Spanish, cooking Cuban meals, and dancing Salsa and Cumbia. I lost my slow, I’m-enjoying-ev-e-ry-syllable-that-rolls-off-my-tongue, Patiose accent, and replaced it with short, choppy Spanglish.
I’ve replaced bathing in the fresh river with a 40 minute traffic jam to everywhere. I’ve exchanged
simplicity for culture, knowledge, and Miami: a modern-day world cultural epicenter. I’m a product of the 80s and 90s, practicing yoga, eating tofu, and more concerned with fulfilling my soul than my pockets. Asking questions like Does it make sense that nothing is affordable, and prices climb everyday? That this country wages war and taxes as a solution for each problem? Why do modern ways destroy the earth, create disease, and thrive on oppression? Each day I find myself contemplating: What is the human experience in today’s world, in this exact moment?
How can my lifestyle promote harmony in my world? What is the truth? My paintings portray my exanimations of the world with these three questions in mind.
The work comes from a very feminine standpoint and deals with issues of what it means to be a woman, now and eternally. Many of my paintings are created in a stream of consciousness: unplanned, spontaneous, and ever-evolving. I allow my natural energy to come out on the canvas; sometimes I brood and work slowly, spending uninterrupted days or weeks on a painting; sometimes I dance, conducting different rhythms and pitches with my brushes; sometimes the creation is erratic.
Then I follow my thoughts as a reaction to what I’ve put on the canvas, developing the idea as I go. When I work like this, I remove a concrete, planned out image, and in turn, a wealth of otherwise untapped information is relayed onto the canvas and a viewer can look onto the complexities of the painting from many different angles. In my work I hope to capture the uniqueness of the moments that I experience as documentation of their existence.
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