Currently on sale at SFMOMA Artists Gallery till October 15, 2021.
Accord depicts a classmate wearing an Afro for Halloween. She liked to wear one occasionally for fun. I found it unexpected and interesting because originally the Afro was loaded with meaning, a powerful political symbol of black pride and a rejection of the European-American standard of beauty. I painted her because I thought that it lent itself well to the theme that I was working on at the time.
I was exploring the interplay between polarities in painting, light dark, thick thin, complementary colors etc. and drawing parallels with life. We are shaped by the tension between conflicting forces that we encounter every day. How we deal with them or react to them shapes our identity, which is constantly in flux. Oscillating between between figurative art and abstraction, which are generally perceived as separate disciplines of art, I imagine a battle between the lost and found until a truce is reached.
