I studied Impressionism, and in its strokes, I found beauty in the simplicity of life—a European landscape, serene, elegant, untouched by chaos. I inhaled every carefree moment, lost in the brushstrokes that danced in the light. Yet, as I stood before these scenes, something unsettled me: the very essence of the everyday was missing. The struggles, the pain, the stories of those left behind were never there.

This painting comes from the everyday reality that I have witnessed all my life. A young Black man, dead in a field, not in peace, but in violence and grief. A sight so familiar, so painfully common, that it echoes through the generations. In the background of my mind, I picture a slave, lifeless in a cotton field—an image so intertwined with the land it became a part of it. And as I paint, I bring that brutality to the canvas, the unnaturalness of a death that should never have been.

This is my landscape. A landscape where beauty was built on the backs of pain, where the idyllic was always far from the reality. The fields I paint have been stained by lives lived in agony, yet their stories are never told. Their absence is as deafening as their lives were invisible.

Condition reports, additional images and shipping estimates are available on request. Private viewings can be arranged with the gallery.