• the chimera
  • the symbols
  • the archive
  • the future
    • Detail — Fractured Doll

    . . . a childishly utopian view

    Since the early nineteen eighties, I've worked to create advertising and marketing campaigns that tell the stories of others. While advertising is not a field that is traditionally pursued by people of color; neither is painting. Storytelling is, but I was told that art is for art sake and paintings are supposed to be about light and not stories. Oh well. Traditional or not, it is difficult to be and to find support for oneself in this world. I've long accepted my duty and my responsiblilty to support my own family first. My dreams had to wait. As a result, my family is fine but I am not. I still need a chance to be what I am — an artist and a woman with a point to make. I still have stories to tell before I rest.

    At Sienna Heights College in Adrian, Michigan, I majored in Ceramics and Painting but I graduated in 1982 with a Bachelor of Arts in Marketing — this to please those who felt life as an artist would be unrealistic for me. The paintings stayed hidden inside me. It took twenty years of life and independent study to make paintings I am finally willing to share.

    In the meantime, I found encouragement in the storytelling art of painters like Max Beckmann and Ben Shahn. At the DIA in Detroit, I spent a lot of time beneath the amazingly narrative murals of Diego Rivera. Also in Detroit, I found one of the most extensive African Art collections in the United States. I have looked and watched and read wherever I could fine another brave enough to leave a record of their own being. Now it's my turn to do the same.

    My paintings are robust and colorful and they do tell tales. Everything seems to symbolize something huge in an infinite, yet sometimes stifiling, space. While these expressions speak of an inner reality, they are free from the constraints of a physical reality: an inspiration I owe to the works of Salvador Dali, Rene Magritte and even Marc Chagall.

    In my paintings, young people struggle with isolation, fanaticism and the threat of poverty. This is a poverty of will and imagination, not just resources. Forced to live without reasonable goals for maturity, they are not self-sufficient. They commit spiritual suicide in order to get along with each other, sometimes stunting their own growth forever.

    Some develop alternative realities to explain away their unfilled needs for safety and leadership. Others attempt to hide their loneliness and vulnerability behind masks. They all want acceptance. Some of them find it through an expensive loss of freedom and potential. They give in to limiting cultural expections. They settle for some sort of normal — even if it doesn't fit. Everywhere life goes on. It will not sustain or nuture them. Isolated in groups, empty of ambition, they do not grow up.

    Split between the souls they are and the lives they live,
    they are all fractured dolls.

    the chimera