Visual Works

This work is an expression of my interwoven identity through the ongoing exploration of the nude figure. Specifically, digitally rendering queer men of size. 

I explore the nude male form because nakedness reveals the honest, vulnerable, and unfiltered truth. Men of size are often told to hide our bodies and our presence. In my coming of age, I spent many years questioning if I’d experience love before I found respite in queer sub-communities. 

Still, my Blackness and masculinity were “qualifiers”. This birthed shame that eventually evolved into feeling unworthy of desire, intimacy, sex, and love: too Black, too big, too sensitive, not masculine or dominant enough, too much. Too…me. The interwoven threads of Blackness, manhood, physique, and endowment informed how I walked the line between objectified and objectionable.

So, I began this work to create a new, affirming, and celebratory truth. Through each painting, I integrate the essence of my creative practice to gain: the possibility to imagine a different, loving, expansive reality; the permission to experience a life contrary to what I’ve been told, implicitly and explicitly; and the freedom to embrace the entirety of me.

I paint men of size to remind myself and other men who see themselves in my work that we’re beautiful, still, and that we might recognize our bodies as safe, loving homes.