Expansion Not Abandonment

I’ve been stuck on this painting.

Not creatively empty. Not without ideas. Just stuck right here, somewhere in the middle.

Day after day, I walk into the studio and look at it. The background is nearly finished. The place exists. The story is there. And still, I haven’t been able to move forward.

I need to. I want to. I know exactly what I want this work to say.

The Exodus Doctrine expands the narrative I began with Nappy Roots. It is about joy. Community. Belonging. It asks what it means for Black people to belong not simply somewhere, but to and with one another. What happens after we have wrestled with identity, inheritance, memory, homecoming? What does it look like to choose life? To build something together? To laugh loudly? To love each other well? To experience joy not as escape, but as something we have every right to possess?

I know that story.

But every time I looked at this painting, it felt wildly empty.

For a while, I thought the problem was that I hadn’t pushed the new visual language far enough. Maybe the figures needed to change. Maybe the way I rendered them needed to change. Maybe the things that have become recognizable in my work belonged to Nappy Roots, and if I was going to make a new body of work, I needed to leave them there.

So I kept trying to solve the painting by moving farther away from myself.

And then, sitting in my studio frustrated, it hit me.

I am trying to abandon the beginning.

I am trying to force a language onto this painting that is not native to me.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the direction I was considering. I could render every person in full color. I could completely abandon the figures within the hair. I could change the visual rules and create something beautiful.

But I don’t think it would make this painting more mine.

In fact, I think it would compete too loudly with everything else I’m trying to say.

The color already has a job. Place has a job. The landscape has a job. The flowers, architecture, sky, clothing, objects, gestures and relationships all have jobs. If everything speaks at the same volume, the painting becomes one singular emotional note. The very expansion I am trying to create gets lost in the noise.

And maybe that’s what I’ve been feeling when I call the painting empty.

Not that there isn’t enough there.

That I haven’t left enough room for me.

My black-and-white figures against saturated worlds are part of my visual language. The figures living within hair are part of it too. They don’t have to appear exactly as they did before. They don’t have to mean exactly what they meant before. Some things may become quieter. Some may disappear from certain paintings altogether. New symbols will arrive. New places will emerge. More people will enter the frame.

Because the practice is expanding.

But expansion is not abandonment.

I don’t have to become a different artist every time I have something new to say.

Maybe artistic growth isn’t always about inventing another language. Maybe sometimes it is realizing that your native tongue is perfectly capable of telling a bigger story.

Nappy Roots gave me a language for identity, memory, ancestry, interiority and homecoming.

The Exodus Doctrine needs that language. It just needs a larger vocabulary. So I’m going back to the painting. Not backward, home.