ARTIST STATEMENT

I carve into the darkness so the light has somewhere to shine.

That is not metaphor. It is method. Scratchboard begins in total black — a clay-coated surface covered in ink — and requires the artist to remove darkness in order to reveal light. Every figure I uncover was always there. I am simply uncovering them.

THE MEASURE

Before I consider a work complete, I hold it to four questions. These are not aspirational goals. They are the measure. Every piece either clears that bar or goes back into the dark.

IMAGINATION — Was I a camera, or an artist?

Did I reframe what I observed, or merely record it? Have I successfully blended diverse knowledge and raw creativity to re-frame the current understanding of the immediately observable? A great image doesn’t show you what something looks like. It shows you what it means.

DEPTH — Does it reach below the surface?

Does it carry meaning beyond beauty and craftsmanship? The technical difficulty of scratchboard is real — every mark is permanent, every stroke a commitment. But technique in service of nothing is decoration. The work must carry something. History. Grief. Fury. Tenderness. Something true.

EMPOWERING — Does it affirm life, dignity, and strength?

Does it leave the viewer more awake, not diminished? The people I render existed in parallel to the official record: present, fully alive in their own time, yet omitted from the frame. My work insists they be seen — not as symbols of suffering, but as full human beings who carried beauty and weight simultaneously.

TRANSCENDENTAL — Does it rise above time and trend?

Could it belong to both yesterday and tomorrow and still feel true? The work I’m most proud of doesn’t feel period-specific. It feels inevitable — like it was always waiting to exist. That’s the standard. Not relevance. Not virality. Truth that holds.

THE PRACTICE

My practice is rooted in Afro-diasporic cultural memory. I work at the intersection of history, ancestral witness, and visual reclamation — using scratchboard’s fundamental tension between darkness and light as both technique and argument.

This means my process is as much research as it is rendering. Before I touch the board I am inside the material culture of the world I’m building — the fabrics, the crops, the textures of daily life that carried meaning without being named as such. Collard leaves dissolving into the folds of a dress. Cotton woven into both garment and bondage. Patchwork pieced from scraps that carry family history in every seam. These are not decorative choices. They are documentation.

I came to this work through over two decades as a Creative Director — building visual narratives for some of the world’s largest brands — and through a scratchboard practice that has always been the deeperconversation running underneath. The CD work taught me precision, economy, and the power of a single image to carry a full argument. The scratchboard practice taught me that the most important things are often what you have to work hardest to reveal.

— this is the measure —