(light music) (airy music) - It is usually an emotional state, feeling something I'm working through and that gets displayed in both color and what takes form on the canvas.

You know, whether it be very abstract, or I still consider this abstract, but it's a little bit more planned.

I get more and more connected as the painting comes to life.

I don't always know what I'm gonna start with.

I mean, that's the beauty of it.

Sometimes I'll have a huge canvas and just start throwing paint all over it and sometimes I'll do something like this where it's a little bit more planned, but I don't know the end result.

All I know is that I want to circle.

What's funny is I'm drawn to to circles and I think they're sort of have a spiritual significance and then as my feelings or mood or something I'm grappling with come to light, then I base my colors on what am I feeling internally.

Sunlight is important to me, period, and to my work, it really helps me with the colors.

I get to visualize the painting itself when I meditate and then I have to think about, well, what is this about?

I've learned that when people are buying a piece of art, they're buying it for sometimes just aesthetic value and sometimes it's because they feel a connection.

Part of my art is as an abstract painter, it's not a spoonfed thing.

If you're looking at my art, I would like you to decide what you see.

So I try not to get involved in, when somebody's asking me too many questions, if they say, "Well, what was this painting about for you?"

I'll say, "Well, what do you see first?"

(airy music) The title that I wrote down while I was meditating is "The Whole, Is the Sum of Its Part," and as a person who is becoming whole, I've got this like half circle, quarter circle, and then I've got these parts.

I think these are my life experiences.

Some parts darker than the others, some parts lighter than the others.

I'm made up of all these pieces.

Born in Chicago, my father got his PhD in linguistics.

When he got his PhD, he did his studies in Amsterdam, in Holland.

So I think that kind of created a leap of like, I'm going to be traveling.

At some point, we ended up moving to South Africa and my father was a teacher there for the men that worked for De Beers Consolidated diamond mine.

Teaching English to the Africans that were living there.

We were not allowed to socialize with people outside of his work, But he did it anyway, we did it anyway as a family.

He was actually advocating for human rights at the time, and that was not welcome.

I think he had done that several times.

The government said, "You're out, deported."

That threw my family into turmoil.

Our first landing spot was a family that took us in in England, close to London.

It was trauma.

Didn't know what was gonna happen to us.

So it was a very difficult time.

Well, I didn't come back to art until I would say 15 or 16 when I was enrolled in an art class.

Absolutely loved it.

Could feel the difference between living in a state of fear or a crisis or stress versus being taken away from all of that.

So the catalyst for getting back to me was really that one point in my life, that moment of clarity, What am I doing?

What am I actually doing in my life?

That was the ultimate reflection, right, of who am I?

What do I want to be, what have I been, what do I want to do with the rest of my life?

Opening up about myself has been a process.

I refrain from a lot of very personal things and experiences, but I do share some, and some of the things that I share are obviously about my life, because that is what I paint about and my feelings and my expression about what is happening and sometimes that can be difficult.

This mural that I was doing for the Virginia Beach Housing Resource Center, I proposed my idea and I said, these are the reasons why I'm doing what I'm doing, what I'd like to do.

So the abstract trees were layered with colors and they had a root system.

They didn't have leaves, they had arms that kind of connected each other to each other, is because of the mission statement of the housing resource center.

We wanna help our clients find roots, so that homelessness is temporary and brief.

And I said, I am strongly connected to what you're doing.

I have been homeless as a child.

I wanted the kids to be involved so that they felt some sense of agency, some sense of self-worth.

For me, that is the point of art.

That's why I do it, because it is transformative.

Art as medicine.

(light music)