My artistic practice documents the human will to integrate internal contradictions, through figurative works featuring Black subjects who are finding communion within themselves, relationships, and/or nature. I render this subtle process visible through my play with the tension between abstraction and realism - my characters are true to form but abstracted in light and color, with blotches transmogrifying their faces, as if they are a memory that is slipping through the mind's grip slowly but surely. As I paint, I carefully layer memory upon memory, sometimes allowing new images to completely overtake earlier images, a reflection of the many seemingly unrelated thoughts that converge and compete in the process of changing one's mind. I do not care to explain this tension away but to revel in it. As Martinican theorist Edouard Glissant writes, we all have the right to be opaque. I revived my artistic practice after 18 years in the United States Armed Forces as a therapeutic strategy to facilitate my transition back into civilian life. Like many veteran-artists before me, I found that my experiences had granted me a new way of seeing that allowed me to expand the possibilities of visual storytelling. I am interested in the relationship of abstraction and realism as a metaphor for that of peace and war, or perhaps more broadly applicable - stasis and dynamism, stillness and the movement that it takes to get there. None of these seeming opposites could exist in theory or practice without the imminence of the other. The characters in my work embody this process of negotiation. They move toward stillness, or they are still knowing that something may soon come to shake them.