Before the Canvas: What I Carried Before I Created

Before I ever picked up a paintbrush, I picked up a book. Literature was my first entry point into creativity. I was a voracious reader, and I still am. I have always been a morning person, and even now I do most of my reading early in the day, when things are quiet and my mind is clear.

I read everything I could get my hands on. Dr. Na’im Akbar’s Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, Will Durant’s The Story of Civilization, the sociological work of W.E.B. Du Bois, and the writings of Dr. John Henrik Clarke, especially his narratives on African leaders and history. I moved through European, African, Black American, and Asian history. Textbooks, essays, poetry, anything that gave insight into how people lived, organized themselves, and created meaning over time.

What drew me in was not just the information, but the patterns. I was interested in how cultures form, how people evolve, and how civilizations are built and sustained. I did not realize it then, but I was developing a way of thinking and a way of seeing relationships between history, identity, and human behavior.

Over time, all of that input started to build up. Ideas, images, fragments of stories, symbols from different cultures, and ways of understanding the world accumulated in me. It sat there like pressure, slowly building. I did not have a way to release it yet, but I could feel it.

Then one morning, something shifted.

It was a Saturday. I woke up early, like I usually do, but this time there was a different kind of feeling. It was not a thought. It was more like an urge, something internal that needed to move. I felt like I could paint. Not that I had learned how, but that I needed to try.

I went to Hobby Lobby that morning and bought paint, both oil and acrylic. I did not know the difference. I picked up a pack of tear-off canvases and went home. I did not plan anything out. I just started.

Those early paintings were based on everything I had been absorbing. African masks, Celtic forms, symbols from different cultures, images I had seen, and ideas I had read. I painted whatever came to mind. There was no system, no structure, and no concern for quality. I was exploring.

Looking back, those were not my strongest works, but they were necessary. I wish I still had them. They carried the energy of discovery, the moment when something internal finally found a form.

What started as exploration did not stay casual for long. It became serious, and then it became something deeper than that. I found myself returning to it again and again, building, experimenting, and pushing further. This was before YouTube and before easy access to tutorials or instruction. I did not have a guide or a teacher. I was somewhere around twenty-nine years old, and this was my first real encounter with painting in a way that touched something deeper in me.

From that point on, I did not stop.

I did not just paint. I explored creativity in different forms. Printmaking, drawing, and anything I saw other artists doing, I wanted to understand it. As I started meeting artists, I listened more than I spoke. I studied their work, studied historical work, and made my best attempts at master copies, even though that was never my strength. I kept working.

After long days, I would come home and go straight into that space. The same hunger I had as a kid, moving through museums when I was supposed to be in school, was still there. It just had a direction now.

Something important happened in that process. The act of creating became a release. All of that information, all of that observation, and all of those years of taking things in finally had somewhere to go. Painting became the outlet.

The images I make now did not begin with paint. They began with everything I had already taken in.

But more than that, it was a continuation of something I had already learned. I was still moving without permission. I was not waiting for someone to tell me what to make or how to make it. I made mistakes. I followed instinct. I worked through feeling, memory, and curiosity. That same independence that led me out of the classroom and into the city was now guiding me in the studio.

That was the beginning. Not just of painting, but of a way of working that I still carry with me now.

I’ve spent time moving through spaces that didn’t hold me.
This is what it looks like to move differently.