Fundamentally,
what I try to do with the work I make
is to make work that has a relationship to art history,
but that is not a kind of recapitulation of
a particular
image, or a style, by copying the existing model.
But instead, trying to use the principles
under which that original artwork,
or that original genre work, was made.
And so, the Rococo seemed to be
the perfect point of departure for that
for–for the picture,
and for it's relationship to the
other paintings in the show
that are called "Vignettes" also.
There's some features that seem to be reoccurring
in all of those works
and one of the things I noticed was that
in almost all of those–
those landscapes
there's a kind of evocation of
the Classical ideal of love
and it's usually embodied in a series of
either statues or ruins that exist
somewhere in the background of the space.
And so, I started replacing some of that imagery
with Black independence and Black nationalism.
In some of those paintings you'll see emblems of
this moment in which Black liberation was kind of a–
a primary focus of a lot of people,
and so those things become
a kind of Classical ideal
that help to inform the way people see those pictures.
So, I live in Chicago,
I happen to be driving home
from a suburb on the far south side
and instead of getting on the expressway
I decided to take a public street–
the surface streets.
And driving down one street
through a neighborhood
that people would associate with a lot of violence,
I passed a house and on the steps
I saw
this scene
as I was driving by,
of a young man standing on the top step
of the porch of a house
leaning over to kiss a girl
that was standing on a lower step.
And if you look at both those people,
the way I saw them,
those are not the people that you'd
expect to see doing that kind of thing.
You'd almost never see them
represented that way.
Because what you don't see a lot of
in representation just about anywhere,
are images of Black people who
seem to like each other,
who seem to care about each other,
who seem to be in love with each other,
these are pictures you just don't see.
Because the news media is almost always
filled with images of Black folks
associated with some sort of crime,
or some sort of victimization,
or some other kind of trauma.
And the historical narrative of
Black people in the United States
is associated almost exclusively
with a kind of trauma.
So I decided I would make pictures
that really went all the way in
in trying to represent a kind of,
represent a kind of relationship between
Black people that demonstrated
a certain kind of affection for each other,
you know.
So that's–that's literally kind of at the heart of
what I've been trying to do
and what I did with this new
"Vignette" painting called "Untitled (The Kiss)".
