"You never truly see something until you try to draw it”

 I am a traditionally trained painter. I still stand by something an old drawing teacher said when I was studying at the University of Urbino for a semester: "You never truly see something until you try to draw it”. I began painting really when I was an undergraduate student and not before, I was also training privately, teaching myself how to render from photographs while class was teaching me to depict from life and color theory. For a long time, I continued with mostly figurative painting, but studying in Italy for four months and seeing a great number of works in Europe’s most esteemed museums made me frustrated that I was working towards something thousands had done before me just as well or better. Being African American I also saw myself unrepresented in these contexts. This is not a shade to any black figurative painters out there, we need more representation in art, but I did not want to continue to associate myself with something I saw today as a sentimental and Western style of artistic expression, I was determined to find a new path to originality. Basically, I did not want to paint figures, use the canvas, the frame, or any techniques in any of the ways predetermined by European tradition and apprenticeship throughout the centuries.