I AM an artist of return: return to self, to choice, to the quiet, persistent question of what it means to live deliberately.

I began painting while incarcerated, in a space designed to define, contain, and reduce. For over a decade, I painted every day—not as escape, but as confrontation. Canvas became a site of reckoning for me: with identity, with consequence, with the tension between what is assigned and what is chosen.

My work unfolds like a dialogue without end. Faces emerge and dissolve. Words insist, repeat, lose meaning, and gather it again. The words “LIFE” appear not as a declaration, but as a question asked over and over until it begins to answer itself. Skulls, self-portraits, fragments of text—each returns, slightly altered, as if rehearsing the possibility of becoming.

I move between stark, graphic portraiture and charged, text-laden compositions where color presses forward, and language refuses to sit quietly. My paintings hold a kind of resistance: to flattening, to labeling, to the idea that a life can be summarized by a number or a moment in time.

At the center of my practice is a simple, unrelenting premise: life is not only what happens to us—it is what we choose, repeatedly, to make of it.

Now painting beyond the institution that once contained me, my work continues to ask what remains constant through change—and what it takes to claim authorship over one’s own life.